Ahead of tabling its 2024 budget, the Alberta government announced Tuesday that if the budget passes, it will allocate $20 million over three years to advance plans for a stand-alone Stollery Children’s Hospital.
The new Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton would offer more beds, larger clinical spaces, more private rooms and dedicated areas for children and their families.
Plans also include integrating mental health resources, virtual care, research and training facilities to better support patients and improve health outcomes.
The current Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton has 236 beds, and is the second largest children’s hospital in Canada. It has among the highest inpatient volumes of any children’s hospital in Canada, according to the province. It is connected to the University of Alberta Hospital.
“A new, stand-alone children’s hospital will build capacity and enable health-care providers to continue delivering world-class care to children,” Health Minister Adriana LaGrande said in a news release.
“This investment, as well as other capital investments outlined in Budget 2024, is an example of how we are creating a more unified and efficient health-care system for Albertans.”
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Budget 2024 would allocate $17 million in new funding from the provincial government. That’s on top of $1 million that was invested in the project in 2021 and $3 million allocated in last year’s budget. The province’s total investment over four years would be about $21 million.
“This remarkable investment will take us one step closer to our goal of building a reimagined Stollery Children’s Hospital for the future,” said Karen Faulkner, interim CEO of the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation.
“A new Stollery is poised to provide the most innovative, modern and family-centred physical and mental health care to help bring hope and comfort to kids dealing with serious illness and injury.”
The current Stollery Children’s Hospital opened in 2001 and sees about 300,000 children per year. The hospital sees 55,000 emergency room visits each year and performs about 12,000 surgeries.
The hospital serves families in a geographical area of more than 500,000 square kilometres, stretching from Red Deer to Alberta’s border with the Northwest Territories.
Nearly 40 per cent of the patients at the Stollery come from outside of Edmonton.
“A new Stollery Children’s Hospital is urgently needed to provide dedicated care for our children,” said Shelley Cormier, the parent of a Stollery patient.
“By separating kids from adults, a stand-alone Stollery ensures a nurturing environment and the most modern pediatric equipment and resources to offer families like ours a health-care space designed exclusively for our children.”
Alberta Medical Association president Dr. Paul Parks said news of the money for a new Stollery is encouraging, but added the immediate need in Alberta is people to staff these facilities.
“It’s good that they’re announcing these projects, it’s good that they’re working on the infrastructure around the province, but we need a workforce. They’re just empty beds. They’re just big, pretty hospitals and buildings if we don’t have skilled health-care workers,” Parks said.
The Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation said it is committed to raising $250 million over five to seven years to help with construction of the new hospital.
The province and AHS have been working on a business case for about a year, to determine where the new Stollery would be located, the cost of construction and a construction timeline.
LaGrange said there is no timeline for when a new Stollery Children’s Hospital would actually be built.
No timeline for southwest Edmonton hospital
Also Tuesday, LaGrange announced work on a new hospital in southwest Edmonton, which was first announced in 2017, is on hold.
“We are pausing to have a more comprehensive look at how we can better serve the needs of Edmontonians,” the health minister said.
Dr. Luanne Metz, Alberta NDP Health Critic, said pausing the project is “outrageous.”
“These hospitals are needed now and they take years to build and we’re not even going to continue with the planning of them,” Metz said.
“The impact on the health-care system of pausing this is that things will get worse and worse.”
The Alberta finance minister will table the 2024 budget on Thursday afternoon.
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