The Campbellford Memorial Hospital will be receiving a $13 million investment from the Ontario Government to address infrastructure concerns.
The announcement was made at the hospital by Northumberland—Peterborough South MPP David Piccini.
The $13 million is broken down as follows:
- $9,639,900 will be going to CMH as one-time capital funding to address the HVAC and generator
- $1,874,929 for reimbursement of CMH’s COVID-19-related capital expenses
- $771,797 in COVID-19 incremental operating funding
- up to $600,000 in one-time funding to support the hospital’s in-year financial and operating pressures
- $163,600 in pandemic prevention and containment funding
- $81,132 through the Health Infrastructure Renewal Fund
- $46,884 in health human resources funding.
Interim President and CEO Eric Hanna welcomed the news, saying much needs to be done about the HVAC and generator.
At the announcement, Hanna spoke of the issues with the generator.
“I’ve got the wee little generator up at the lake and then I’m thinking well, everything should be going well at the hospital,” Hanna told the audience in attendance.
“You get a call from the person in charge who says, ‘Guess what Eric? Generator didn’t start. Oh, so what does that mean? There’s no power in the hospital.’ That’s happened a couple of times in the past year and the generator is over 30 years old.”
Hanna says the solution was not as easy as replacing the generator.
“You can go buy the generator and that may be about a million dollars. But then when we found out afterwards, we came to hook up the new generator to the electrical distribution system and said it won’t work with that because your electrical distribution system is 1956. You can’t plug this generator into that. So now we’re putting close to $5 million into a whole electrical distribution system so the generator will work. It’s part of that ongoing thing and that’s why these costs continue to go up.”
The HVAC system was also something addressed by Hanna.
“It’s a contract close to $7 million to replace that. This wing, for example. There’s no fresh air in this wing. It hasn’t worked in here for 15 years. So now this is administrative areas and the concern was that in some of the patient carriers, it wasn’t working either. So – having those discussions with David (Piccini) and saying what we have to do to correct this.”
