After 16 years, the Centretown Community Health Centre is receiving a much needed $6.6 million upgrade.
The centre, located at 420 Cooper St., offers a variety of healthcare services ranging from mental heath programming to primary care services.
The CCHC has been in its current location since 1999, and sees more than 15,000 clients each year. Since then, the centre has outgrown its current space, forcing it to move its administrative services to a neighbouring building in order to have adequate room for its programs.
“We need to redesign our current program space to make it more welcoming and inviting, and to meet accessibility standards, to meet safety standards, and also to have more group rooms and space for programming that we offer, because we’re doing a lot more than we did 15 years ago,” says Simone Thibault, executive director of the CCHC.
Heading up the design process is Parkin Architects, a Centretown-based firm with extensive experience in healthcare-related renovation projects.
Within Ottawa, the firm has done work at the Queensway Carleton Hospital, as well as at The Royal mental health centre and the Ottawa Hospital.
Redesigning the space involves reorganizing the current layout of the facility to make it more efficient and organized.
A big part of the new design is centered on the creation of gathering spaces within the facility, says Kim Kennedy, vice-president of Parkin Architects.
This includes adding a hub for the centre’s nurses and doctors where they can come together “to integrate their ideas and their conversations, so that no one feels like they’re working (alone). They come as a team, they share their ideas and they share their concerns,” says Kennedy.
While the centre will have to fundraise to take on some of the costs of the renovation, the majority of the funding for the project is being provided by the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, which has a five stage planning process.
The CCHC began that process in January 2014 by submitting an initial proposal to the ministry. Currently, they are working on completing a preliminary design plan that they hope to submit to the ministry for approval by March 2016.
After receiving ministry approval, the plan is to begin construction in January 2017. If all goes well, after an extensive interior renovation, the refurbished centre is expected to be completed by March 2018.
Complicating the renovation process is the fact that the centre will need to continue to provide services to its clients while construction is ongoing.
In order to do this, the construction will be done in phases to minimize the disruption to the centre’s services, says Kennedy.
“It’s all doable, it just makes it very inconvenient for the people living and working there. But we try to minimize it as much as we can and get in and out as quick as we can,” she says.
Thibault says the centre looked at a number of options when it became clear that the current facility had become too small, but “the community was quite adamant that they didn’t want us to move.”
“We serve a lot of people with low-income challenges right around our neighbourhood where we’re located and the people in the community said, ‘We really want you to stay, please don’t move,’ and so that was one of the decisions that helped,” she says. “We said ‘Yup, you’re right, let’s just make it work.’ ”
According to Thibault, the centre needs to be updated in order to serve its clients better.
“We didn’t have enough group rooms, we didn’t have enough exam rooms, some of them were too small,” says Thibault. “We wanted to serve more people and our space was not helping us do that, it was actually impeding us from doing that.”