Quebec’s Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Andrée Laforest announced that the Dolbeau-Mistassini Hospital Surgical Unit Upgrade Project is authorized to begin its design phase.
The project manager, the Société québécoise des infrastructures (SQI), will release tenders for design and engineering services in the coming weeks. This work will help to establish the required budget envelope for the project.
“By granting the project permission to begin the design phase, we are ensuring that an important step is taken towards its realization. This decision is consistent with all our efforts to provide Quebeckers with the best possible access to surgical services in an even safer and more modern setting for both patients and facility staff,” said Danielle McCann, Minister of Health and Social Services.
The goals of this project are: to make the operating room units more functional, to improve logistics (especially to increase confidentiality), to better divide activities to avoid crossings in the sterile area, to expand and create spaces that are better adapted to the current context, and to ensure better infection prevention.
The units that will benefit from the planned work are the operating theatre, the day surgery, the medical device reprocessing unit (URDM) and the endoscope reprocessing unit.
Among the improvements made by the project are:
- a block of four rooms, including a room for general surgery, another for specialized surgeries, an endoscopy room and a minor surgery room, to repatriate all activities to one place;
- a recovery room with three stretchers and a joint preparation and recovery area for endoscopy and surgery with nine stretchers;
- the inclusion of work to correct the logistic non-conformities of the URDM, the relocation in this sector of the reprocessing of endoscopes and the adequate management of traffic in the block and neighbouring sectors.
A project to modernize the operating theatre is also under development at the Chicoutimi Hospital.