Firms find plenty of work in hospital projects

Construction in the health care sector continues to steam ahead in Ontario. Among the projects with recent announcements from Infrastructure Ontario are a major expansion to Kingston General Hospital and the construction of a brand new North Bay Regional Health Centre. There is also to be a new hospital in St. Catharines to serve the Niagara Health System.
Of these three, the project furthest along is the new acute care hospital and mental health facility in North Bay, which will have over 380 beds and associated outpatient and support spaces, with a total building area of 725,000 sq.ft. Construction has reached the half-way mark and should be finished by June 2010. Evans Bertrand, Hill and Wheeler are the architects. Mechanical and electrical engineers are H.H. Angus of Toronto and Piotrowski Consultants of North Bay. Structural engineer is Halsall of Toronto and Anrep Krieg Desliets Gravelle. Civil engineer is Trow. Project Manager is ZW Group, and PCL Group is doing the construction.
To the east, Kingston General Hospital contracted PCL Constructors in July to build and finance a new redevelopment. The $142-million project includes 170,000 sq. feet of new construction in a new wing, and renovations to the existing 143,000 sq. foot complex. Included in the construction is a new medical surgical area, more facilities for acute mental health patients, and a cancer centre with two new radiation bunkers. The project team includes Thompson Rosemount Group as mechanical and electrical engineers, Goodkey, Weedmark & Associates as mechanical and electrical engineering subconsultants, Adjeleian Allen Rubeli as structural engineers, HDR Mill and Ross Architects, and ZW Group as overall project managers.
In August the Plenary Group was selected to design, build, finance and maintain the new health care campus in St. Catharines for the Niagara Health Care system, but no details about the engineering firms were available.
Meanwhile three projects are starting to take shape in Toronto. In July, the Toronto Rehabilitation Centre selected Aecon Group to build and finance a redevelopment and expansion of its centre at 550 University Avenue downtown. The expansion involves a new 13-storey patient care centre and a research tower on the site of its former four-storey south wing. There will be more than 17,000 square feet of new and enhanced research space. Murphy Hilgers Architects, now part of Stantec, are the architects.
A project to expand Centre for Addiction and Mental Health on Queen Street has been launched with a request for qualifications issued in June.
For the Bridgepoint Health Project near the Don Jail in Toronto’s east end, three teams were shortlisted in July to submit their proposals to design, build, finance and maintain the 600,000 sq. feet new hospital. The teams are Access Bridgepoint Health (includes Babcock & Brown Canada, Farrow Partnership); Carillion Canada (includes HOK, Montgomery Sisam, Vanbots); and Plenary Group (includes HDR/Diamond Schmitt, PCL and Johnson Controls).