It'll be at least 2027 before the $100 million expansion to Boundary Trails Health Centre (BTHC) is complete, according to a timeline provided Kyle MacNair, implementation lead with Southern Health-Sante Sud.

PembinaValleyOnline caught up with MacNair Monday as the BTHC Foundation provided the first payment of its $10 million pledge to Southern Health-Sante Sud for the project. He explained, the Community Services building is expected to open in early 2026. As for the new inpatient unit, MacNair said there's a little more flexibility with that timeline, but that addition should open for direct patient care in either late 2025 or early 2026. 

Then, the renovations to the existing hospital will begin. 

"That renovation will be a multi-phase renovation. The first wing is going to start. That's the where the Cancer Care expansion and ambulatory care expansion is going to occur. Then we're going to move to the emergency department and expand that, then we'll move to the second floor, and we'll add the operating theaters and some additional physician spaces, some sleep rooms for the physician."

After that, crews will shift their focus back to the new inpatient unit, finishing out its second floor.

While it's hard to pin how many people it has taken to get to this point and to push the project across the finish line, MacNair says hundreds and thousands of hours been poured into it. 

He explained, the first iteration of the plan was floated to the provincial government in 2016 and fine-tuned through 2018. The decision go forge ahead was made in 2020, and two architecture firms were hired.

"Hundreds of hours of meetings occurred with the clinical teams - the physician services, the nursing services, the Allied health services to design up all of these spaces and that was just to pick the square footage that we needed for each of the areas. Then we went into the design phase, which also all the clinicians were brought in again to kind of look at the design, make comments, and then that design was kind of completed and the construction started." That was in June 2023. 

At the same time, individuals including the clinical teams, have been doing ongoing reviews of the inside in what MacNair calls mock-up layout of rooms.

"We're going to bring individuals into that building and say, 'is that plug in the right place? There's this head wall. Is that in the right place?' That is actually going to occur periodically, really, over the next year as the building gets more and more refined." 

This process will begin again when the project moves to the renovation phase. 

"We've got kind of the preliminary diagrams of what it's going to look like for the renovated areas. We've got to refine that and then start meeting with the clinical teams to really set that plan out for what the renovation space is going to look like. So really, we're going to just be another year, year-and-a-half of design again for that renovation work."

With files from Connie Bailey