A sneak peek 'inside' the new South Niagara Hospital

It may be four years before the new South Niagara Hospital officially opens its doors, but Niagara Health provided a glimpse of just how the inside of the new healthcare facility will look.

The health system showed off mock-ups of the rooms during a media event at a Welland warehouse on Tuesday. In all, eight rooms were featured, including a patient room, exam, operating, procedure, recovery, medication and intensive care unit room, as well as an elevator lobby.

“The rooms that we've selected are either rooms that repeat many, many times, such as the patient rooms —there's going to be 469 of them — so, we want to make sure we get it right the first time, instead of in the middle of construction or at the end of construction when people are moving in,” said Izabela Cawricz, Director, Interiors and Furniture, Fixture, and Equipment, for Niagara Health’s South Niagara Project team.

The rooms were chosen also for the complexity of needs, such as with an operating room, she added.

“We want to make sure that as things move around the room, that staff are still able to do their job properly,” she said.

The mock-ups began life as tape on the floor, Cawricz said, before they were done up in cardboard and finally constructed in the Welland warehouse, which is being leased by Niagara Health and Ellis Don Infrastructure Healthcare, which is currently building the 1.3-million square-foot hospital at the corner of Montrose and Biggar Roads in Niagara Falls.

All throughout the process, input into the designs of the various spaces was sought from users, patient partners, Indigenous partners, accessibility advocates and more, Cawricz said.

“There was over 200 people that came through. They provided feedback and helped us really look at some of the design features to make sure, again, that we get it right the first time and that it makes sense from a clinical functionality perspective.”

Engaging with patient partners was informative, especially when it came to accessibility, Cawricz said.

“We've talked about things like something so simple as the sliding door. For some of us, we take it for granted, and for others, it's like just a really great benefit,” she said.

When complete, the 12-storey hospital will replace the aging Greater Niagara General Hospital in Niagara Falls. In addition, urgent care centres in Fort Erie (Douglas Memorial) and Port Colborne (Port Colborne General) will be shuttered.

At the same time, Niagara Health has plans to redevelop its Welland site, including maintaining 24/7 emergency care and 90 complex-care beds among other things.

Progress at the hospital site itself and being able to see what their new workplace will be like has gotten a lot of the staff at GNGH excited — especially for what will be in store for patients and their families with features such as all patient rooms being private, Cawricz said.

“You can rest a little bit easier at night without having someone in the room next to you, just feel a little bit more of like a sense of private space,” she said. “That obviously helps with how you feel and how you recover.”

Rooms also feature such things as monitors for patient information — everything from treatment schedules to what is on the menu for meals — a station for bedside charting, lifts and more. They will also be furnished with chairs that can be pulled out and converted to cots for family members who may wish to stay overnight with a loved one.

Equipment in all the mock-up rooms is new and will all be utilized in the new hospital when it opens, Cawricz said.

“We wanted to make sure that we were mindful of the budget,” she said.

Short videos showing the mock-ups can be found on Niagara Health’s YouTube channel.