Infrastructure Ontario and St. Michael’s Hospital have issued a request for qualifications to design, build and finance a new 17 storey patient-care tower at the corner of Queen and Victoria Streets and the renovation of approximately 150,000 square feet of existing space.
The new tower will allow St. Michael’s Hospital to relocate patient beds from an 85-year-old wing and provide larger space for programs that treat some of the most critically ill patients from across Ontario. These programs include patients from the medical-surgical intensive care unit and the largest adult cystic fibrosis program in North America.
Highlights of the project include:
• Five new operating rooms, each large enough to include state-of-the-art medical imaging equipment. These hybrid operating rooms will allow surgeons to perform minimally invasive, image-guided or catheter-based procedures, as well as undertake open surgery in the same operating room;
• Enlarged, state-of-the-art inpatient facilities for orthopedic surgery, oncology, coronary care and respirology — including the cystic fibrosis program — as well as critical care space for the coronary and medical-surgical units;
• Expansion of the current Emergency Department, which was originally designed to accommodate 45,000 patient visits a year, but now accommodates over 70,000 a year — a number that continues to grow with the population. This expansion will allow St. Michael’s to continue to fulfill its mandate as a regional trauma centre.
The request for qualifications is the first step in the process to select a team with both the construction expertise and financial capacity to design, build and finance the project.
Submissions will be reviewed to pre-qualify project teams with the design and construction experience as well as the qualified personnel and financial strength to deliver a project the size and scope of St. Michael’s. These teams will then be invited to respond to a request for proposals, which is expected to be issued in early spring 2013.