RVH details multi-billion dollar expansion plans

Simcoe Muskoka's largest hospital announced more specific details about plans for the future, which were outlined at Barrie City Council Monday night.

During council's virtual meeting, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH) president and CEO Janice Skot said the massive plan's overall cost is $3 billion.

Skot said approximately $2.3 billion would be spent on the Georgian campus and roughly $700 million on the south campus.

"This is a two-site one system plan, so we are not duplicating services between the two sites we're really seeing it as a single system."

The Barrie campus will feature a new tower increasing bed capacity and new state-of-the-art operating rooms.

"There is a tower planned at the current campus site on Georgian Drive in Barrie that will be a very large expansion as well as a second campus for RVH in Innisfil," said Mayor Jeff Lehman. "Both of those pieces will serve the growth in our region."

The new hospital being built in Innisfil will focus on outpatient care to start before being a fully equipped hospital with a full-time emergency room within 20 years.

Skot said before they begin any of the considerable work, they must first fill in "shelf spaces" at the hospital.

"We have some shelved spaces in our current expansion we opened in 2012, so we're just making sure that we fill in all those spaces. For example, there's a whole unit of shelved space we have submitted a document to the government asking for a new 15-bed critical care unit that should almost double the size of our critical care."

Skot said it could be as many as five to six years before any construction begins.