By Rosemary Quipp
After years of providing both specialized and emergency mental health care, the Royal Ottawa Hospital has a new direction and a new building to match.
The hospital will no longer treat walk-in patients, who will now have to go to the emergency room or their family doctor and get a referral to the facility.
“The mandate of the Royal Ottawa Hospital has changed from an acute mental health care facility to a place where patients are referred to receive specialized care,” says Tim Kluke, the president and CEO of the Royal Ottawa Health Care Foundation.
Kluke says patients will only be referred when a doctor thinks the patient is not responding to traditional treatments, or has a complicated case, such as more than one mental illness at once.
When the change to providing only specialized care was mandated in 1999 by the Ontario government, the hospital staff knew they could not provide up-to-date services in their old building because it was not designed to be a mental health hospital, says Kathryn Hendrick, vice-president of communications and public affairs for the Royal Ottawa Health Care Foundation.
Hendrick says they analyzed whether it would be more cost effective to build an entirely new facility or to renovate the 100-year-old hospital, which was originally built for tuberculosis treatment and became a mental health hospital in 1961. Because of the costs associated with operating the old building, they realized building a new, more efficient hospital would save taxpayers $17 million over the next 20 years.
“The Ontario government had given us permission to renovate a wing, but we decided to fight for a new facility,” Hendrick says.
Construction of the new hospital began in November 2004, on the same 26-acre tract of land as the old building. While the new hospital will open its doors on Nov. 1, the old building still has to be torn down to make room for the youth wing, which will open next year.
The rest of the land will be turned into gardens where patients and their visitors can get out of the hospital for a walk, Kluke says.
The new building will also be home to research facilities. The hospital has partnered with the University of Ottawa to house the Institute of Mental Health Research, where patients will be given the option to participate in studies.
“It helps us to attract some of the best physicians in the world who are interested in research … a big focus of our facility is that we’re a teaching hospital,” says Kluke, referring to the medical students who will be able to do their residencies at the hospital.
Another new feature is that the hospital is the first in Canada to be completely wireless, meaning doctors will have access to patient information on handheld computers anywhere on the hospital’s 400,000-sq. ft. campus.
The total cost of the hospital and research facilities was $132 million, $15 million of which had to be raised by the governing body of the hospital, the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group.
“Normally a hospital is asked [by the government] to raise 30 per cent of the cost, but because they know it’s hard to raise money for a mental health facility, we were given a smaller percentage,” says Kluke.
With just over $9 million left to raise, Hendrick says they have multiple proposals out in the community and are confident they will have the rest of the money by next summer’s deadline.
While the number of beds is dropping from 200 to 188, the hospital plans to compensate by increasing their community outreach. These services will be especially useful to people who are unwilling to go to a hospital, such as the homeless, says Hendrick.
According to the Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health, two-thirds of homeless people using urban shelters suffer from some form of mental illness.
“In an environment [like a shelter] that isn’t stable, unfortunately they don’t take their medications like they should,” says Samantha Laprade, an employee at The Ottawa Mission, a downtown homeless shelter. “We always hope that an expansion of services in another facility can help our clients.”
In addition to helping the people they couldn’t reach before, both Hendrick and Kluke say they hope the new building can raise awareness about mental health and reduce the stigma associated with it.
“Twenty per cent of Canadians are affected by mental illness, which means it touches every Canadian in some way,” says Kluke.who added that 40 to 75 per cent of those affected never seek treatment.
“The stigma really is an issue. We need to get people talking about mental health.”