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Waterloo Region is a Thriving Community Missing a Critical Piece: A New Hospital Infrastructure in KW Waterloo Region can’t wait any longer to put plans in place for new hospital facilities to better serve the needs of our rapidly growing and thriving community. We need more hospital beds. We need more hospital services. The last few years we have seen an influx of people moving to our community and our population is projected to grow significantly over the next 20 years. We need hospital capacity to accommodate this growth. We need facilities engineered and built to modern design standards to replace our aging hospitals and provide patients the care they deserve. We need world-class infrastructure to enable our hospitals, in partnership with local businesses and post-secondary institutions, to fully reach our potential in health research, innovation, technology development and learning. The reality is we were dealing with chronic hospital capacity pressures and limits to our ability to be innovative as a result of our aging facilities well before the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the past two years of navigating COVID-19 have provided a snapshot of the severity of our space challenges and what our future may hold if we don’t move quickly to build a new hospital and expand our capacity to serve this community. We never want to be in that position again. Like hospitals elsewhere in Ontario, capacity pressure throughout the pandemic impacted our ability to provide care and forced us to take the drastic step of suspending nonurgent surgeries and non-emergent services. We never want to be in that position again. We are determined not to be. To make this a reality, St. Mary’s General Hospital and Grand River Hospital are building on a long tradition of partnership to plan for the future of hospital services as part of an integrated healthcare system in our region. Together, we are looking to secure the support of the provincial government for new and renewed, state-of-the-art hospital infrastructure. This would include a new site in Kitchener Waterloo that would be jointly used by both organizations.
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Our executive leadership teams and boards are currently at the preliminary planning stages of this joint project. We have shared our proposal with the Government of Ontario, but the final master plan will be determined at a later stage of planning after community consultation and government approvals. Decisions over where the proposed hospital would be located, timing of construction and the future of our current sites have not yet been made. There is much to be determined as the planning process unfolds but one thing we know for certain is that collaboration will allow us to build something better together than we ever could by going it alone. Waterloo Region is one of the fastest-growing jurisdictions in the country The unfortunate reality in today’s fiscal environment is that the process to secure provincial approval and funding to build new hospital infrastructure in Ontario is complex and lengthy. There is intense competition from regions across Ontario to tap into limited provincial funding to help pay for new hospitals. It can take 10 to 15 years on average for a project to go from an idea to reality, though in the spirit of this community we will aim for it to be less. That’s why we are embarking on this joint project now. We need to be prepared for the population boom coming our way. Largely thanks to this thriving and active business community, Waterloo Region is one of the fastest-growing jurisdictions in the country. As a result, we will need nearly double the number of hospital beds we currently have in the next 25 years. According to the Ontario Minstry of Finance projections, population growth in Waterloo Region is projected to continue climbing quickly, rising from nearly 580,000 to approximately 840,000 over the next 20 years – an increase of 45%. Compounding the challenges of growth, our population is also getting older. Over the same timeframe, the number of residents older than 75 in Kitchener-Waterloo is expected to
