Staff at Saskatchewan Hospital were hard at work again in a third 3P LEAN planning session last week.
The 3P planning - Production Preparation Process - wrapped up Friday afternoon after staff from the hospital came up with a design for the support services wing of the new hospital.
This wing would be the one responsible for custodial and maintenance workers, as well as food services for the whole hospital. These are the staff responsible for such things as cooking the food, handling laundry and making sure the rooms and linen are cleaned.
During the week-long 3P process, staff came up with design mockups of what the new support wing would look like; as well, they came up with life-size mockups of what the kitchen and some of the rooms would look like.
They presented their ideas and mockups on Friday afternoon at a Prairie North Health Region facility on Marquis Avenue. In attendance were consultants from John Black and Associates. Architects facilitated the 3P sessions and signed a contract at the end of it that pledged to honour the ideas and concepts brought forward during their week of planning.
Also at the 3P report unveiling were Mayor Ian Hamilton, provincial MLAs Larry Doke and Herb Cox (Saskatchewan Hospital is located within the boundaries of Doke's riding of Cut Knife-Turtleford) and provincial health minister Dustin Duncan. Though he has seen the 3P process elsewhere in the province, this was Duncan's first opportunity to see it with respect to Saskatchewan Hospital.
This was the third and likely last week-long 3P planning session for what will be the province's new psychiatric and forensic hospital, to replace the 100-year-old facility currently in use.
Similar 3P sessions were held last summer over two separate weeks. The first week of 3P planning focused on what the short-term and long-term care wings of the new hospital would look like. The second week focused on the therapies and forensics areas.
Front-line staff and hospital patients have been involved in the process, providing input and observations.
Now the plan is for the concepts developed from the past week's 3P process to be subject to input from the groups involved in the previous 3P sessions.
According to Steve Manthey of John Black and Associates, that is to happen within 30 days with the idea of bringing all the concepts and processes together.
That will be followed by 30-day, 60-day and 90-day review periods involving all three groups, where there will be more fine-tuning in order to improve the "flows" of people and information back and forth, and reduce the amount of walking time for staff and patients.
"The idea is to work on the value-added time, get rid of the waste, and that will automatically make a project move toward getting in budget," said Manthey Friday.
This review period will keep those involved in the new hospital design occupied for at least the next seven months. Beyond that, a firm timeline towards commencing construction for a new hospital is still uncertain.
In speaking to reporters, Duncan said the most recent 3P event was an important step before some key decisions on the project can be made. One of them has to do with the possibility the new hospital could be combined with a corrections facility adjacent to it.
"We still have some decisions to make about what options we may have for the joint-use part of the facility," said Duncan.
"Now that we have the information from the third 3P, we can now go and make the determination on what the final project will look like, how we will incorporate corrections or not incorporate it."
Also to come is "how to proceed with procurement of the facility," said Duncan, referring to the possibility of building the new hospital using the P3 public-private model.
Duncan indicated that holding this latest 3P was important prior to moving ahead with that decision as well.
What the minister could not give was a firm timeline on when shovels would go into the ground.
"The timelines will really be determined by the next two steps. What are we building, in terms of the Saskatchewan Hospital as well as the corrections piece, and then whether or not we proceed with a P3," said Duncan. "So today, I can't say a timeline because essentially those two decisions need to be made."
One big decision that will impact that timeframe is whether the project will proceed as a P3 -a public-private partnership - or whether it will instead be built in the traditional manner.
During the 3P last week, staff brainstormed and came up with their own ways to improve the "flows" in the new hospital that people are able to move through the new facility as quickly and easily as possible.
Their input was in part based on their experience at the existing Saskatchewan Hospital. Staff were able to identify some shortcomings that could be addressed and rectified in the new hospital, particularly when it came to reducing the time needed to get where they needed to go in the new building.
While many staff were new to the process, it is a familiar one by now to senior officials at Saskatchewan Hospital and Prairie North Health Region.
It seemed obvious this time that there was far less uncertainty about the whole 3P LEAN process than last summer. Senior hospital officials had by now seen the process in action twice before, so there was familiarity in what to expect.
"You need to trust the process," said Lionel Chabot, finance and operations vice-president at Prairie North Health Region, to reporters on the final day.
"At the end of five days we always get to the same spot, which is the design of a building that had tremendous staff input."
