KENORA – The Ontario government has signalled via social media that it will fund construction of a new hospital to replace Lake of the Woods District Hospital.
“Ontario is building a new hospital in Kenora,” a sponsored post on Instagram declares, adding that the move is “part of our $48 billion plan to add 3,000 more hospital beds” in the province.
The announcement through Instagram “was outside the normal,” Ray Racette, the current Kenora hospital’s CEO, told Dougall Media in an interview Monday.
Precisely how much provincial funding the new hospital’s construction will get is still unclear, he said.
The amount coming from the province likely won’t be known until after Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy tables his 2024-25 budget next week, Racette said.
Where the new hospital will be built isn’t certain either, but hospital vice-president Cheryl O’Flaherty said there is “a preferred site.”
She said that location, the former site of a sawmill, hasn’t been acquired yet.
O’Flaherty said the new hospital, planned in partnership with the Kenora Chiefs Advisory, will have a larger campus, 75 acute care beds like the current hospital, and seven more mental health beds than the current hospital’s 17.
Racette said all patient rooms will be single-occupancy.
“Having single-patient rooms is really good from an infection-control point of view,” he said, adding that single-bed rooms also mean more privacy and less noise.
He said the new hospital will also have larger rooms for palliative care and birthing – “because at beginning and end of life there’s more people in the room that want to be there.”
Kenora Chiefs Advisory executive director Jennifer Dreaver termed the government’s Instagram post “a validation of a lot of hard work and ongoing work.”
The new hospital has been planned with a goal “to bring traditional healing and traditional practices and ways of healing within a conventional hospital space,” Dreaver said.
“Really, the objective is to fully transform the space,” she said.
A ceremonial room, Indigenous Resource Centre, traditional kitchen, traditional healing rooms and sweat lodge are among the features planned for the new hospital.
