New St. Paul’s Hospital gets go-ahead from government
The provincial government is providing almost $1 billion of the $1.9-billion cost of constructing the new St. Paul’s Hospital in East Vancouver.
Construction could start as early as next year on the project, which will deliver a stateof-the-art new hospital with 548 beds, 115 more than the current St. Paul’s, Premier John Horgan said Friday at a news conference at the Main Branch of the Vancouver Public Library.
The new hospital will be built at 1002 Station St. in an area known as the False Creek Flats. The 7.2-hectare (18acre) site is to the north of Pacific Central train station.
Horgan said while the business plan for the new hospital was developed in 2007, it has been stalled for 12 years.
“I’m proud to stand here today before you all to say the wait is over and that approval of the business plan has happened,” he said. “Government will proceed with procurement this year. By 2026, there will be a new St. Paul’s on the Station Street site.”
Horgan said the new hospital doesn’t serve only people in Metro Vancouver, but also in the rest of the province. He cited statistics that said about 29 per cent of St. Paul’s services are provided to people living around B.C.
He described the new St. Paul’s as a community-based facility, and singled out some of the major donors in the audience, including billionaire Jim Pattison, who pledged $75 million to the St. Paul’s Hospital Foundation in 2017.
The Vancouver Sun asked for a more detailed breakdown of the business plan for the new hospital.
The Ministry of Health said that the provincial share would be about $990 million. The remaining $910 million was described as coming from the following sources:
The St. Paul Hospital fundraising campaign “anticipated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The $75-million donation by Pattison. The Louie family, which owns London Drugs, has pledged $6.5 million for a cardiac centre.
Proceeds from the sale of the current St. Paul’s Hospital land at 1081 Burrard St.
In 2015, The Vancouver Sun reported that St. Paul’s was at a high risk of collapsing in an earthquake based on new seismic assessments. One earlier proposal was to spend $850 million to seismically upgrade the building.
But Providence Health said that staying on Burrard was the “wrong decision, and that the benefits of a modern, custom-built, hospital that left room for future expansion simply outweighed the nostalgia for the old location.”