Red Deer finally sees Alberta make $1.8B commitment to expand hospital

Central Alberta's busiest hospital will see the capacity it needs added within the decade. 

Premier Jason Kenney and other officials were in Red Deer Wednesday to announce the next allocation of funds for the expansion of Red Deer Regional Hospital, bringing the Alberta government's total commitment to the project to $1.8 billion by its scheduled completion in 2030 or 2031. 

The expansion will see the hospital grow from 370 in-patient beds to 570 and from 11 operating rooms to 14. A new cardiac catheterization lab will also be added. 

Red Deer Mayor Ken Johnston called the announcement monumental for his city and surrounding regions. Half of Red Deer Regional Hospital's patients live outside of the city it is named after. 

"This announcement is life saving, it is life affirming, and it is life changing," Johnston said.  

Local residents have long called for the government to improve hospital capacity in the region. Education Minister and Red Deer-North MLA Adriana LaGrange said her own father-in-law died in 2000 after waiting two days for a bed at the facility. 

"The expansion of the Red Deer Regional Hospital is undoubtedly the number one infrastructure issue in central Alberta," LaGrange told reporters on Wednesday. 

The hospital's inadequate capacity was only exacerbated in recent years by the COVID-19 pandemic and population growth in the region. 

• Red Deer hospital on surgical diversion, patients being diverted to Edmonton, Calgary
• 'We need action immediately': Red Deer leaders were pleading for help years before triaged ER patient's death
• Red Deer hospital diverts surgeries to 'reduce patient wait time': AHS

Adding health-care capacity is one of the Alberta United Conservative government's priorities in its forthcoming budget. 

"This is not just about central Alberta. Every additional bed that we are able to open here in Red Deer and central is an additional bed in the entire Alberta public health-care system," Kenney said. "You know that through the peak of COVID waves, too often we had to transfer patients out of this hospital, sometimes by medivac, to Calgary and Edmonton, because the ICUs were overflowing in the hospital behind me. That should never happen again." 

"The important part about this announcement," Health Minister Jason Copping added, "is the $1.8 billion is committed, so there can be clear work that can be done by [Infrastructure Minister Prasad Panda]." 

Not every dollar of the $1.8 billion announced is new; $100 million was committed in the 2021 provincial budget. 

An estimated $193 million will be spent over the next three years for planning. According to Kenney and Copping, the community will see shovels in the ground within that time. 

"The needs assessment is done, the budget is done. Now goes the next phase in terms of detail planning, in terms of what each specific space needs, and then start building," Copping explained. 

"I wish we could snap our fingers and open up these 200 plus extra beds tomorrow, but the reality is when you're building onto an existing hospital, it's extremely complex," Kenney said. "We have to build an additional facility, move patients into that, then renovate the old portion, and do that in three or four phases. It's like building an airplane while it's already taking off down the runway."

More details about the province's plan to bolster Alberta's health-care system, including chipping away at its surgery backlog and reducing wait times, will be revealed Thursday in the new provincial budget.