The Dauphin Regional Health Centre's Emergency Department is now open, and starting to accept patients.
Craig Doerksen, Shared Health Executive Director for Capital Projects, said the road to where we are now hasn't been easy. The majority of discussions and work to get the emergency department open again was focused on conversations with DRHC staff and contractors, finding ways to address the staff's needs for a functioning emergency department.
"It was about pulling together the front-line staff, who knew what they needed to be able to open up an emergency department and re-open an emergency department, and then bringing our contractors and the consultants in to say, what is possible, what can we do within this timeline, and we evaluated multiple options...we've had to bring in temporary power, we've brought in additional HVAC to be able to cool and heat the space, and we brought in some additional facilities, there's trailers out the back of the facility, all to support the ongoing operation here while we're in this interim period," said Doerksen.
The City of Dauphin has also been an important collaborator on the project, especially when it comes to patient experience. Doerksen said the effective communication between the involved parties was definitely a help to avoid unnecessary slowdowns.
"That happened so frequently, the communication between the teams was awesome, communication between the City of Dauphin to make sure that they could assist us with parking, and making changes to the facility, getting our permits evaluated, helping us with signage, working with the Province and getting electrical inspections going on," said Doerksen.
Though the DRHC's Emergency Department is now open, the work is far from over. Doerksen said the immediate next steps will be to continue improving the emergency department, and eventually make it self-sufficient, not relying on external power. Once that is done, the teams will begin working to bring back other services to the facility.
"Actually our focus this last three and a half weeks has been achieving today, and there's still some continued work that we want to do in this existing facility to make the emergency department services a little better...and then we're starting to concentrate on looking at the total project timeline, looking at what it's going to take to remediate the basement level, the ground floor, and crawl space, get all of that addressed, and then begin restoring services like normal electrical power, normal ventilation, and heating," said Doerksen.
As we get closer to the winter, Doerksen said heating is a very high priority for the teams. Prairie Mountain Health and Shared Health will continue to provide updates as repairs progress.
