Ontario hospital sounds alarm as aging building faces population boom

The health of Ontario’s healthcare system is not just dependent on doctors, nurses, and other frontline staff but the environment they work in — including the physical buildings.

Something as simple as improving Wi-Fi access or adding more electrical outlets is a struggle at one southwestern Ontario hospital, where the 70-year-old building wasn’t constructed for today’s technology.

Roughly a quarter of Ontario hospitals are in poor condition and require significant investment to get them up to current standards. For five unidentified hospitals, it would be more cost-effective to completely replace them.

The data, obtained by Global News using freedom of information laws, did not include the names or locations of individual hospitals but provided a geographic outline of where hospitals in most need of repair are located.

The facility condition rating for St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital (STEGH) was not provided, but the main building will mark 70 years in 2024.

“With limited resources, we have to pick and choose what we can invest in because sadly, the list is always longer than we have for available funds,” Tonya Sheldon, the hospital’s vice president and chief financial officer, told Global News.

There are few private rooms in the main building, which houses about 60 to 70 per cent of STEGH’s 179 beds. Washrooms are not wheelchair accessible, Sheldon added.

She said STEGH has a robust patient feedback program and many of the comments have centred on the state of patient rooms.

“It’s getting harder and harder to keep the upkeep, right? You’ve got peeling and bubbling paint, you might have leaking pipes which you can see maybe the staining going on in a ceiling tile,” Sheldon said. “And private washrooms is another one, right? When you’re sitting in a ward room with, you know, two, three, four other people and you have to share a washroom with three other individuals.”

Sheldon also knows the impact state-of-the-art infrastructure can have on patient care, thanks to the completion in 2017 of a $63.3-million project involving the construction of a three-storey, 106,000-square-foot addition to the northwest side of the main hospital building.

The north tower now houses the hospital’s operating rooms and emergency department, which were previously in the original 1954 building.

“I think we at least tripled, if not quadrupled, in footprint space for our new emergency department,” Sheldon explained, adding that having all of the rooms wrap around the centre nursing area allows for staff to have a line of sight into all patient rooms.

The old building posed infection control issues for the hospital and the extension has helped to mitigate them.

“In the old tower, we were having patients and clean and dirty laundry or clean and dirty instruments going back and forth up the same elevators. So now with the North Tower, we have separate patient elevators. We have a separate clean elevator. We have a separate dirty elevator.”

Going forward, however, the challenge for St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital is that there is no room to expand outwards — the two-acre lot is surrounded by residential buildings — and the hospital is facing increased demand that is expected to accelerate.

“We see over 55,000 patients annually through our emergency department, and we deliver about 730 babies every year. We do about 9,200 surgeries every year,” Sheldon explained.

While the region benefits from specialized care at the nearby London Health Sciences Centre campuses, STEGH is the only hospital in Elgin County and roughly 10 to 12 per cent of its patient numbers come from outside the region.

Its maxillofacial program, a very detailed jaw surgery only offered at a couple of hospitals in Ontario, brings patients from across the province, Sheldon said.

“And it all depends on where the physician will refer them. And it could potentially be we have better wait times for surgery, for example, so a patient may get referred to one of our surgeons.”

Sheldon said increases in violence, addiction and homelessness in the region “trickle into our emergency departments, into our acute care hospital, and into our mental health units.”

The region is also booming — and expects to welcome new workers as electric vehicle megaprojects get off the ground.

“With the recent announcements of the Volkswagen battery plant coming, it’s even more significant for us that as we’re operating at capacity right now, what does that mean as more and more industries start to open up in St. Thomas and Elgin County?”

St. Thomas has a population of just over 41,000 people, according to Statistics Canada data from 2021, an increase of 10 per cent from 2016.

Sean Dyke, CEO of the St. Thomas Economic Development Corporation, said the city has seen “considerable growth” since 2021 and he expects the strong growth will continue, “likely at an even faster rate and is largely dependent on availability of housing.”

Paul Jenkins, CEO of the St. Thomas and District Chamber of Commerce, anticipates the population will grow by 10 per cent at minimum by 2026, possibly even 20 per cent.

The PowerCo SE electric vehicle battery manufacturing gigafactory, Volkswagen’s first in North America, is expected to begin production in 2027 — bringing with it 3,000 direct jobs.

Jenkins acknowledged the challenges when the facility was first announced in March, but previously stated that they are challenges the community can face “optimistically and positively.”

Sheldon said STEGH has been meeting with municipal and provincial politicians to raise its concerns.

“We have this huge volume that’s happening in St. Thomas and Elgin County, and then we anticipate more coming in to do with this great announcement,” she said.

“St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital has been operating at or above capacity for well over probably the last 10 years. And a majority of that care does occur in our main building, which is over 70 years old.”

In an email, Jenkins noted that he was the executive director of the hospital foundation from 2013 to 2020 and led the fundraising campaign that helped build the new north tower.

“Our humble facility is one of the best-performing community hospitals in the province. Our ER, in particular, with patient volumes similar to Toronto’s Mount Sinai, consistently ranks first among 74 comparable facilities in having the shortest ER wait times in Ontario and has (done) so for more than a decade,” he wrote.

STEGH has submitted a redevelopment plan to the Ministry of Health. It wants to investigate whether the main building can be renovated or if it is more cost-effective to replace it entirely.

A project of that magnitude could take “up to 10, 15 years,” Sheldon said.

Meanwhile, Canada’s other massive EV battery plant is under construction in a region that is roughly two-thirds through such a timeline.

The Stellantis electric vehicle battery gigafactory in Windsor, Ont., is expected to create 2,500 jobs, with a goal of completion by 2025.

Windsor Regional Hospital’s $2 billion “state-of-the-art hospital at County Road 42 and the 9th Concession” — meant to replace its two “existing outdated acute care campuses” — won’t be open until 2030 at the earliest.

Currently, the region is served by its Metropolitan campus built in 1928 and its Ouellette campus which was originally built in 1888, but renovated and expanded multiple times, most recently in 1962. The original 1888 building was demolished the following year.

WRH was formed in 2013 when it joined with Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, which then allowed for the start of planning a “system-wide hospital plan” for Windsor-Essex.

The proposal for the mega-hospital was submitted in 2015. The proposal process was completed in 2017 and followed by a “detailed planning phase.”

According to the WRH, construction is expected to begin in the summer of 2026 and is expected to take at least four years.

Global News reached out to WRH for comment but was referred to its website for information about the mega-hospital.

A spokesperson for the province said significant investment had been made in southwestern Ontario.

“Our government is getting shovels in the ground for over 50 new major hospital redevelopment projects, building 3,000 new hospital beds across the province, providing operational funding for 49 new MRI machines including St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital’s first MRI machine,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said $1.6 million was given to STEGH in 2023 for “critical upgrades and repairs.”

— with files from Global News’ Isaac Callan and Colin D’Mello