November marked two years until the Teck Acute Care Centre (TACC) opens its doors to patients on the Vancouver campus of BC Children’s Hospital and BC Women’s Hospital + Health Centre. Construction is moving ahead rapidly with work underway on the top floors of the building. The scope and scale of the new facility is no longer difficult to envision.
“Although the pace of progress on site is very impressive, it is hard to believe that the whole building will be complete and open to patients in about 24 months,” says Dave Ingram, Chief Project Officer, BC Children’s and BC Women’s Redevelopment Project.
Construction began in May 2014 and when the new TACC opens in November 2017, it will be 59,400 square metres (640,000 square feet) in size and feature eight floors of clinical space. It will provide expanded and enhanced clinical space, single-patient rooms and integrated technology and equipment. It will also have the integrated clinical spaces and resources to accommodate teaching and research.
“The new hospital will transform the delivery of care to children, their families and women of B.C.,” says Ingram.
The BC Children’s and BC Women’s Redevelopment Project is building the TACC on the Vancouver hospital campus as part of a three-phase redevelopment under the leadership of the Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA). The project is being delivered as a public-private partnership (P3) through a 30-year agreement with Affinity Partnerships to design, build, finance and maintain the TACC.
On the west side of the building, work is underway to complete the concrete structure of the top floors. Meanwhile, several levels of the east side of the building have been completed and rapidly progressing upwards.
“We’re the tallest building on the Oak Street Campus,” says Ingram. “Inside, we’re already starting to work on the rough-ins, where the electrical wires are going to run, where some of the mechanical ducts are going to run, where the partitions are going to come up to separate out some of the rooms inside the new facility.”
The main floor for the new Ledcor Children’s Emergency Department and Lee Family Diagnostics and Imaging Area is taking shape. The second and third floors will house the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), Birthing, Transfusion Medicine, Procedures Suites, Pharmacy, Alex Skidmore Renal Dialysis Unit and the Milk Handling Room.
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The fourth floor will be home to the Hudson Family Pediatric Intensive Care Unit and the ANOM Special Procedures Suites, while the fifth floor will house the medical device reprocessing department and mechanical and electrical. The sixth and seventh floors will treat medical/surgical inpatients, and the Capstone Mining Corp. Oncology Unit, the hematology/bone marrow transplant units and a satellite pharmacy will be located on the eighth floor.
The next phase of construction work will focus on installing the dry wall and the exterior cladding while the structure is still being built upwards.
“I think it’s great to see people so excited now that it’s starting to take shape,” says Ingram.
For more information about the project, visit www.newcw.ca.
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