When Dr. Sandy Nash moved back to his hometown of Kelowna in 1969, the emergency department at Kelowna General Hospital had one bed.
Today, construction is underway on the $170-million, 360,000-square-foot Centennial Building, which will include a modern emergency department four times larger than current 23-bed unit.
Meanwhile, UBC will take over its faculty of medicine campus at the hospital next month. It is next to a new 350-stall parkade that will solve some of the current parking problems at KGH.
“That‘s the kind of growth we‘ve had,” said Nash, now physician manager of ambulatory care.
The concept for the Centennial Building started initially as an expansion of his ambulatory care department, where hospital staff treat patients who are not confined to a bed.
“None of us wants to be in the hospital overnight. We‘d like to come in, have our gall bladder out or colonoscopy, and we want to go home,” he said. “Ambulatory care is the most efficient, cost-effective way to do that.”
However, as the process evolved, hospital officials realized the existing emergency ward was not big enough and that the hospital needed more beds and daycare operating rooms.
His job became ensuring planners didn‘t forget the original intent was expansion of ambulatory care, Nash admitted with a laugh – “and they didn‘t, but I was in their face.”
In 2005, the province announced the establishment of a medical school that became a satellite of UBC. The first 32 students will arrive in 2011.
The first floor of the two-storey campus will have a library for both the campus and hospital, with academic space on the second floor.
The next phase of hospital expansion, now under review by the province, is cardiac surgery, to be located in a new building that will replace the original hospital structure on Pandosy Street at Rose Avenue.
Ambulatory care will have the entire second floor of the Centennial Building, bringing together elements currently scattered in pockets around the hospital.
“It will really be quite a busy, busy area, (and) probably three times as much space as we have now. This will be much more efficient, and we‘ll be able to share staff functions and waiting areas,” said Nash.
“I‘ve always been very enthusiastic to have daycare ORs (rather than using main ORs). In other words, you walk into that suite with your clothes on, you have your surgery, you go home and a nurse phones you later that night asking how you are doing. It‘s a much more dignified way of looking after people.”
One of the most positive additions is a 180-seat auditorium in the UBC campus.
“We don‘t have an area now where we can sit down all our docs or nurses and do an educational thing. . . . We‘ve gone from a community hospital in 1969 to a tertiary-care hospital to now a teaching hospital,” he said.
“The amount of growth along the way is phenomenal at every level, from housekeeping to the CEO. It‘s just incredible.”
As a teaching hospital, KGH will always “attract the best of the best,” Nash said.
The addition of youthful, enthusiastic, passionate doctors in training will “preserve our standards of medicine (and) our enthusiasm forever. That will have the biggest impact here, bar none.” Top of Page
