Building hospital to take nine years
No further barriers stand in way of acute-care facility, CEO says
A timeline for the proposed Windsor-essex mega-hospital has been set: construction could be completed in roughly nine years.
Windsor Regional Hospital on Tuesday announced the tendering process will likely begin in early 2025. Construction of the new $2-billion acute-care facility is scheduled to begin in the spring of 2027, and will take about four years.
The latest update follows the October 2021 funding announcement by Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Christine Elliot that allowed the hospital to move forward with Stage 2 planning.
“The new acute-care hospital project has moved ahead aggressively in the last 18 months,” said hospital president and chief executive David Musyj. “We went from no funding for Stage 2 to full funding and now a fixed (request for proposal) date and shovel in the ground date.
“Premier Ford made a promise to our region and delivered on that promise. Additionally, I cannot thank our City of Windsor mayor, Drew Dilkens, Essex County warden, Gary Mcnamara, community leaders and residents throughout our region enough, for making this historic project become a reality.”
While the news comes only a day before the provincial election kicks off, Musyj said the hospital had been expecting to hear more about the project in Infrastructure Ontario's May 2022 market update, which it now has.
Work on Stage 2 hospital planning began immediately following the October 2021 announcement, including the creation of a project management team.
Thirty-eight user groups, representing different clinical and non-clinical support service areas in the hospital, as well as patients and community members, are developing a “functional program” for the new facility.
The functional program is a detailed planning document outlining future services, activity volumes, staffing levels, new technologies, and space requirements, among other issues.
Over the next few months, architects and engineers will create schematic plans for the building to illustrate how the rooms in each department will be organized.
The hospital said those plans will likely be ready to submit to the Ministry of Health by early next year.
After that, there's further development and design work, and the process begins for selecting a developer.
“I have to stress, this is not a simple project,” Musyj said. “This is very complicated. No disrespect, but this is not a warehouse, this is not a strip mall with a large retail facility — this is a very complicated process that's going to take some time.”
Musyj said he would have “loved” to put “shovels in the ground today.” But for that to have happened, the hospital would have needed funding from the previous Liberal government in 2017. Then-minister of health Eric Hoskins said at the time that “the government has absolutely committed to the investment necessary” to build the mega-hospital, but his government never provided the money to do it.
Lengthy appeals by a group fighting the County Road 42 location selected for the mega-hospital — Citizens for an Accountable Megahospital Planning Process — also delayed development, Musyj said. A judge last year dismissed CAMPP'S latest bid against the location and ordered it to pay the City of Windsor and Windsor Regional Hospital's legal costs.
As of Tuesday, said Musyj, the mega-hospital has no obstacles in its way.
“It's baked into the budget, so it's going to take a government to change that. That would be the only thing,” he said. “If a different government gets into power and has a different opinion regarding the timing of this project, that could possibly happen. I hope it doesn't.”
The two-year period between issuing the request for proposal and going to tender could be shortened, Musyj said, but it's “highly unlikely” because “there's so much work that needs to be done.”
This is not a strip mall with a large retail facility — this is a very complicated process that's going to take some time.