The new Patient Care Centre at Royal Jubilee Hospital campus in Victoria is a showcase building of high-quality craftsmanship achieved on a tight schedule and on an even tighter building site.
The 37,000-square-foot tower is a ten-storey, 500-bed facility that will replace buildings on the campus constructed in the 20s and 30s.
Despite its size, incorporating the building into the surrounding neighbourhood was of utmost design importance. A significant architectural aesthetic was tying into and interweaving with the existing buildings with materials and colour.
The exterior features fiber-reinforced cement panels, curtainwall, and brick, and rock walls curve along the building face, calling visual attention away from the structure’s height and down to the ground level.
The building is a P3 project between Vancouver Island Health Authority and ISL Health and is constructed based on VIHA’s three pillar approach—sustainability, elder-friendliness, and staff-friendliness.
It will reduce wait times and provide single rooms for 80 per cent of patients recovering from illness, injury, or surgery.
Jubilee Hospital received over 17,400 acute care admissions last year.
The P3 process allowed work to begin on the foundation before the drawings were even complete. Full-scale mock-ups of various room designs meant interior details regarding floor, wall, and ceiling design were worked out well in advance.
The design and layout of the interiors was based on the patient room being the central point, and working out from there. The bedrooms are positioned as the “hub” around which supplies and work areas are stationed, providing a staff-friendly environment.
For Sunco Drywall Ltd.’s Surrey-based team, the project represents the successful completion of a large volume of work on a relatively short timeline and among tight quarters.
At the project’s peak, 140 men and women from the company completed more than 400,000 feet of insulation; 800 lineal feet of interior steel studs, manufactured by Bailey Metals; 1.4 million feet of drywall including 80,000 feet of Abuse board; 40,000 feet of shaftwall, and 40,000 feet of M2 board, manufactured by Certainteed.
The drywall was supplied by Commercial Construction Supply, along with 110,000 feet of corner bead.
BC Ceiling supplied Sound Solution sound panels that were installed in the auditorium and atrium areas, as well as 220,000 feet of high NCR ceiling tile manufactured by CGC, Inc. Cascadia Design supplied 11,000 feet of metal security ceilings manufactured by Intalite.
Architects Canon Design met VIHA’s requirement for three-pillar excellence through “evidence-based design,” which incorporates quantifiable, researched strategies aimed at improving staff and patient health.
Placement of the washrooms, room design, and hand rails that extend from the bed into the washrooms are design features supported by evidence that they contribute to lower incidences of slips, trips, and falls.
Overhead lifts and decentralization of nursing stations contribute to staff health by reducing the risk of injury and minimizing the number of steps required to go from stations to patient rooms.
For Sunco Drywall, evidence-based design was the reason behind high NRC ceiling tiles, which control sound reverberation in the building.
Sound-absorbing panels on ceilings and walls and quiet flooring and equipment minimize noise, while natural-themed art and calming music further reduce stress.
The sound panels in the atrium area are printed with images of operating rooms from the early 1900s, a design feature that brings attention to the facility’s long history of providing medical care.
“The design also meant there were 2,400 site instructions for meeting the owner’s exact requirements,” says Sunco Drywall Manager Eric Brown. “There were lots of SIs and on-the-fly changes to co-ordinate with the owners.”
Changes to the building schedule were addressed in part by general contractor Acciona Lark Joint Venture’s use of factory-built modular bathroom pods that arrived onsite ready for installation.
The lightweight pods come service-ready for connection into patient and staff areas.
“Whilst being a relatively new introduction to construction in North America, the pods will become a preferred construction tool of the future on projects where repetition in design is a theme,” says Ian Rothera, operations manager, Acciona Infrastructures Inc.
As is mandated for all publically-funded buildings in B.C., the tower is constructed to meet LEED Gold requirements.
Surface water management, storm water retention and reuse systems, and xeriscape landscaping were just few features that led the building to its target, as do fresh-air ventilation, natural lighting, and low-emitting and sustainable building materials.
Fortunately, says Brown, the drywall industry finds easy success in LEED projects because of high-recycled content in steel studs, drywall, ceiling tiles, and insulation.
“That helps us quite a bit,” he says. “The manufacturers are very co-operative with providing the information required for LEED and that makes it quite helpful when putting the packages together.”
While paperwork associated with LEED projects can be cumbersome, Sunco does enough of this type of work that it is becoming second nature.
“It does take time and paper work and the site conditions do change because it is a LEED project, but you learn to deal with it,” says Brown.
The scope of work was completed in 14 months – a tight schedule for the volume of work required. “It was also a tight site,” says Brown, which made co-ordinating materials loading and delivery critical.
The site is constrained on the west by the street, to the north by the main access, to the east by the diagnostics and treatment centre, and to the south by the existing buildings.
“You had to be precise about when trucks arrived, and what skips and cranes you were using,” he says. “There were literally trucks pulling out and another backing in. There was no onsite storage, so materials were on-demand.”
The installation was a typical hospital-quality installation, which meant greater attention to sound detailing, fire-ratings, and a high-quality finish.
“The suspension of the ceilings was made more difficult by the amount of mechanical systems in the ceiling so there were some challenges there in getting everything up to seismic codes,” says Brown.
Rothera says the hospital is designed and built as a post-disaster building capable of withstanding and continuing to operate after a seismic disaster.
“From the structure itself, to the life safety and drainage systems, everything is designed to meet the stringent regulations of the BC Building Code,” says Rothera.
“Building a facility of this nature requires a long-term view of the future of healthcare,” he adds. “The hospital is built not only to operate as a first class facility in 2011, but to continue to meet and cope with the needs of the public for the next 30 years and beyond.”
Onsite air quality control measures meant everything needed to be vacuumed using a HEPA system vacuum, and air circulation filtering systems were set up throughout the building during construction.
“Everything had to be recycled—metal, wood, drywall, cardboard, etc. There was a recycling program onsite, with bins moving in and out and squeezing into the corners to make sure the recycling was done properly,” says Brown, who adds that Acconia-Lark Joint Venture did a great job of co-ordinating trades onsite and ensuring the end result was positive.
Brown says the company’s success at Royal Jubilee was the result of remarkable work by the company’s crew and management team. He would like to thank the following people for their dedication and hard work: Rick Labbe, main estimator; Russ Gattinger, site project manager; Dino Gusola, office project manager; Curt Schmidt, site foreman; Opal McMillan, site safety manager; Lance Brewer and Joe Maidment, steel stud layout; John Zilic, boarding foreman; and Wayne Boseley tape foreman.
“Without those guys we couldn’t have completed the job on time,” says Brown. “We had a good labour force and talented people and they left a really good project. Everyone is happy with it and it turned out really well.”
Construction completed December 31. Tours and fit-up were scheduled between January and February, and the patients will occupy the space in March.
Article by Jessica Kirby
This article orignally appeared in the April/May issue of The Trowel Magazine, the journal of record for the BC Wall & Ceiling Association.
