Among the more than 200 supporters attending Tuesday’s groundbreaking for the new Montreal Children’s Hospital, it was a St. Leonard mother of three who highlighted the need for a new pediatric teaching hospital in a personal way.
Virginia Gattola carried a blue shovel covered in plastic sandwich wrap and bearing the name of her son, Bruno Gattola, who was found to have abdominal cancer in 1992. He died in 1995 at age 16.
With tears in her eyes, Gattola explained: "The Children’s became his home."
"We were anxious the new hospital be built," added Laura Faustini, Gattola’s daughter-in-law.
Tuesday, those worries – shared by many in the city as the McGill University Health Centre superhospital worked its way from idea to reality – appeared to be a distant memory as politicians and hospital administrators shared high-fives and excavators and dump trucks busily moved earth on the Glen campus site.
Construction of the MUHC’s $1.3-billion superhospital officially got under way with a groundbreaking in the spring.
The Glen campus is to be home not only to the new Children’s but to the new Royal Victoria Hospital, the new Montreal Chest Hospital, the new Montreal Neurological Hospital, a cancer centre and the MUHC Research Institute.
But Tuesday was all about the new 154-bed Children’s, which will introduce such innovations as separate elevator systems for clean items (linens, food and pharmaceuticals), dirty items (garbage, contaminated medical supplies), visitors and staff as well as a floor plan that will see single-patient rooms arrayed around a central nursing station.
It is slated to be completed by 2014, officials said.
The new Children’s will reinstate Montreal’s oldest children’s hospital as a leading North American pediatric hospital, Quebec Health Minister Yves Bolduc said, before adding that as a young doctor he did an internship at the Children’s in 1981.
Bolduc said while he has always had great respect and praise for the doctors, nurses and therapists at the Children’s, the time had come to replace the aging Children’s hospital on Tupper St. with a state-of-the-art facility.
"We want to make things possible that are not possible today," said Nicolas Steinmetz, a former executive director of the Children’s, who is credited with launching the idea for a new Children’s back in 1992.
He said he never lost hope that the hospital would be built, because the design innovations of the new Children’s will enhance the healing environment, cut down on the spread of bacteria throug separate elevator systems and improve overall care with central nursing stations.
It took 25 years to bring to life the new Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and Paris’s new superhospital, neither of which treat children as the MUHC superhospital will, Steinmetz said.
"So far as these things go, we have done pretty well."
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