CHEO gets $105 million to put all child health services at one site
Province funding construction of new 200,000 square-foot building on campus
After years of sending children and their families across the city for outpatient mental health and special needs services, the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario will get a long-awaited new building to contain those services under one youth-friendly roof.
Premier Kathleen Wynne made the announcement during a visit to CHEO Thursday morning. The news brought some families and staff who have long lobbied for the “one-door” approach to pediatric services to tears.
The province committed $105 million to the project to build a six-storey, 200,000-square-foot building on the CHEO campus that will house mental health, autism, speech and language, rehabilitation and more services that are now housed in rented spaces around the city. It will also be home to the Champlain Complex Care Program.
Funding for the new building will be in the provincial budget, to be delivered March 28.
“We are very, very excited that this project has finally gotten approved,” CHEO president and CEO Alex Munter said after Wynne’s announcement.
“We will be able to take dollars we are now paying to commercial landlords for spaces not really designed for kids and be able to invest them in direct care and redesign our services around the needs of kids who have multiple different diagnoses.”
Barbara Casey, director of mental health for CHEO and the Ottawa Children’s Treatment Centre, said some of the rented spaces used for mental health services do not serve the purpose well and raise concerns about confidentiality because of a lack of soundproofing in some cases.
“We forget how important an appropriate therapeutic space is to the recovery of young kids and families, so this is going to make a huge difference in terms of the qualify of the environment,” she said.
Wynne said the building will reduce wait times and allow for more customized treatments for children with special needs. Centralizing programs on the CHEO campus, she said, will also reduce stress and logistical challenges for families.
She mentioned a five-year-old CHEO patient with Down syndrome named Adrienne who was being treated at CHEO for leukemia. She had to miss more than a year’s worth of crucial speechtherapy appointments because she needed to be at the hospital and the services were provided elsewhere in the city.
Munter said the aim of the project is to make life simpler for families and children already facing challenges.
“This is a chance for us to bring our resources together, our programs together, our people together and organize our services around the needs of kids, their families and the unique service needs they have,” he said.
“Yes, it is a building. It is going to be a beautiful, awesome, kickass building, but more important is what is going to happen in that building.”
The project will serve about 40,000 families who use CHEO services.
CHEO rents space at eight locations across the region and spends more than $1 million a year on rent to do so.
Construction of a new facility is expected to take about three years.
It will eventually include programs funded by the Ministry of Children and Youth Services including special programs for eating disorders, autism, mental health, sexual assault and early language development.