the new St Paul's Hospital and Health Campus

About

Project Vision & Overview

Your health is the motivation for the new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus

The BC Ministry of Health has a new vision for delivering the best care to people living in B.C., which places the patient at the centre and calls for the delivery of co-ordinated health care services where and when people need them most. The vision puts as much emphasis on helping people to stay healthy, address episodes of minor acute illness and better manage their chronic illnesses, as on providing high-quality critical and acute care services when they are very sick, supported by technological innovation.

The new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus will be a catalyst to realize the Ministry of Health’s vision for a new model of health care in B.C. that puts patients at the centre, integrates services across the continuum of care and shifts non-acute care from hospitals, bringing it closer to people in their communities. The new hospital will draw on its lengthy history of delivering integrated, seamless, patient-centred compassionate care to all B.C. residents.

The right care by the right provider, in the right place at the right time

The vision for the new hospital and health campus — to be located in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats area on Station Street, three kilometres from the current hospital site on Burrard Street — is to lead in the delivery of B.C.’s new model for health care by providing our patients with the highest quality, integrated, innovative and patient-centred care, where and when they need it most.

The new hospital and health campus will offer an integrated care model by blending hospital-based services with a number of primary care and community health services and support programs, both on the new campus and in the broader community, in partnership with Vancouver Coastal Health and other providers. Research and teaching will be highly integrated throughout the campus at our heath innovation hub, the Clinical Support and Research Centre (CSRC), enabling our world-class care providers and researchers to work side-by-side to bring medical breakthroughs to our patients at the bedside and in the community faster than ever before.

By combining critical, emergency, surgical and acute hospital-based care with community and primary care, the new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus will enable smoother transitions for patients at home, in the community or in the hospital — wherever their needs are best met. This integrated model will help healthy people stay healthy, while providing high-quality critical care when they are very sick. It will also result in better quality care, better health outcomes, a better experience for our patients and their families and improved value for health-care dollars.

The new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus will remain an adult academic health sciences organization — a globally renowned care, research and teaching hospital that ensures excellence in acute, emergency and critical care and serves patients from throughout the province.

The newest hub for heath care discovery, research, and innovation

Our newest hub at St. Paul’s Hospital and Health Campus, the Clinical Support and Research Centre (CSRC), will be a cornerstone for healthcare discovery, attracting the best people to deliver excellence in care, research, and innovation.

The state-of-the-art research, technology, and medical complex will be just steps away and connected to the new St. Paul’s Hospital. The CSRC will be home to a full spectrum of spaces, from core research facilities including wet labs, specimen biobanks, a daycare, and more.

The CSRC will bring together Providence’s physicians, researchers, clinicians, corporate staff, and leaders. With all this top talent under one roof, the CSRC will be a world-class facility more than a sum of it’s parts, creating an environment where experts are brought together to create synergies, spark ideas, and transform care.

Potential features of the new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus

The new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus will continue its 125-year tradition of helping the most vulnerable people in our communities: those with HIV/AIDS, those suffering from mental health, substance use and other complex urban health issues, the elderly and people with chronic illness, and critically ill people living in B.C. with heart, lung and kidney conditions.

It will have 548 beds; which includes a net new 115 beds. The site will be home of several leading provincial programs and referral centres, including for heart and lung care, renal, eating disorders, and specialty surgeries and transplants.

It will offer a diverse and long list of general and specialized care, including: chronic disease management services; emergency and critical care; mental health and addictions’ beds and programs; ambulatory services and outpatient clinics; end-of-life care; Indigenous health; maternity; colorectal and gastrointestinal services; and community care and community outreach programs.

Designing the new hospital and health campus around improved patient experience and provider wellness. Our patients and providers will benefit from spaces that not only flow but are well laid out and incorporate healing design.

Elements that will improve experiences and optimize wellness include:

Access to natural light & views
Single patient rooms with space for family and support persons to stay overnight. Minimize infections and maximize privacy
Seniors-friendly campus layout
New technologies and state-of-the-art spaces, including digital way-finding to allow easy navigation around the campus
Outdoor and other spaces for wellness & rejuvenation
Sacred spaces (All Nations Sacred Space, therapy roof gardens, chapel)
Public art, incorporating Indigenous perspectives into campus design

The Best Care for BC

Healthier patients
A seamless patient experience
More integration to fill gaps in care
Continuous learning
Meeting future needs
State-of-the-art facilities
Attracting the best people
Strategic alignment and integrated planning

The new integrated care models, programs and facilities at the new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus will lead to better health outcomes for patients.

The new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus will make the patient’s journey seamless — whether for hospital care or for primary and community care — providing quicker access to services and eliminating waste and duplication. This will also result in better patient experiences and improved satisfaction.

Access to a wider diversity of integrated care programs and services, and better coordination between care providers and clinics will result in earlier detection, intervention and treatment of illnesses and help prevent avoidable hospitalizations. The new models of care that will be created at the new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus will substantially impact positively on the health and wellness of the populations St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus serves.

Care providers and world-renowned researchers will work side-by-side to rapidly transfer knowledge into meaningful advancements in care. The academic health sciences organization on the health campus will bring research breakthroughs to patients faster, enabling people living in B.C. to be first in line to receive the latest in treatments, therapies and care practices.

The new St. Paul's Hospital and health campus will be designed to help meet B.C.'s health care needs for the next 125 years.

The new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus will feature the latest advances in technology and its facilities will meet or exceed infection control standards, keeping patients safe. For example, there will be single-patient rooms to minimize infections and maximize privacy.

The new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus will enable Providence to continue to recruit and retain the best and brightest care providers and researchers in the world who will provide patients from across the province with the best patient-centred care. It will also provide nurses, doctors, researchers, volunteers and other health care staff with safe, world-class facilities in which to provide excellent care.

The St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus redevelopment vision is also aligned with the key priorities of the BC Ministry of Health and Providence Health Care’s other health authority partners, such as Vancouver Coastal Health, to address chronic disease management, mental health and substance use and seniors care.

Location

Station Street: The ideal site for a new integrated health campus

Size

The successful implementation of the new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus redevelopment requires an entirely new build on land that can adequately accommodate the new buildings and best serve the needs of patients from throughout the province. For this reason, the 18.4-acre Station Street site in the heart of Vancouver has been identified as the ideal location.

This parcel of land — about the size of roughly 15 football fields — is one of the largest undeveloped sites in Vancouver, with enough space to accommodate the new buildings on the health campus and still have room for future expansion as health care needs evolve.

See where our new campus is located in Vancouver’s False Creek’s Flat.

Distance

The Station Street site is a relatively short distance from the current St. Paul’s Hospital location on Burrard Street — about 3 kilometres away.

Accessibility

The site for the new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus is located along Station Street, between National Avenue and Prior Street and behind the Pacific Central Station. Situated in Vancouver, it is centrally located to serve patients in communities in Vancouver and across B.C.

The site is at the nexus of major transportation arteries (provincial and regional highways and arterial city roads), close to key public transit connections such as SkyTrain and several bus routes, next to bike routes, and adjacent to the Pacific Central Station, which connects to many train and inter-city and cross-border bus routes.

Close to Areas with Increasing Patient Needs

The Station Street site is close to the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood from where a growing number of patients are presenting to St. Paul’s Hospital, including its emergency department.

Potential for Future Expansion

The large size of the 18.4-acre Station Street site presents the opportunity to expand the programs, services and facilities on the new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus as future health care needs evolve. Other potential future development phases at the new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus may include an Indigenous Wellness Centre and mixed-use commercial and residential rental development.

Neighbourhood Transformation

The new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus will be located in a neighbourhood — False Creek Flats — that has a robust City of Vancouver plan for future development and transformation, including improved transportation access and vehicle traffic by eliminating the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts.

The City of Vancouver expects the number of jobs in the area will grow from 8,000 to 30,000 over the next 30 years. With that will come housing, arts and culture, and green spaces…the very definition of a transformation.

St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus in the context of land use planning for the False Creek Flats

High-quality, accessible and inclusive health, social and community services are an important part of a healthy city for all. How can the relocation of St. Paul’s Hospital to the False Creek Flats foster a state-of-the-art hub of innovative health services and an integrated neighbourhood approach to the development of the hospital facilities and their operations? The new hospital can be a place for people to connect and collaborate with local organizations, service providers, social entrepreneurs and other groups to bring greater social connections to the area and the surrounding neighbourhoods.

— City of Vancouver profile on False Creek Flats

St. Paul’s History & Background

Providence Health Care — A tradition of compassion for 125 years

Our story of innovation began more than a century ago when the Sisters of Providence arrived in Vancouver. Drawn to Vancouver by stories of suffering in the burgeoning coastal city, the Sisters listened to the community and made a plan to meet the needs expressed by the people. In 1894, they founded St. Paul’s Hospital, a 25-bed “cottage” on the path to English Bay and the first hospital to provide medical care to the 14,000 people living in the growing town of Vancouver.

Today, Providence Health Care is one of Canada’s largest faith-based health care organizations, operating 17 health care facilities in the Lower Mainland, including St. Paul’s Hospital. Providence specializes in delivering hospital, residential and outpatient services to serve six key areas: heart & lung risks and illness, specialized needs in aging, kidney risks and illness, HIV/AIDS, mental health and substance use and urban health.

St. Paul’s Hospital — A global leader in treating the most complex health care needs

Six decades after it was founded, St. Paul’s Hospital performed its first open heart surgery, and in 1975, performed the first mammogram in western Canada. In the 1980s, when fear of HIV/AIDS was rampant, St. Paul’s Hospital was the first, and some say the only, hospital to open its doors to a rejected and desperately ill group of people.

St. Paul’s Hospital became home to the provincial heart centre in 1994 — the provincial referral centre for B.C.’s most complex cardiac cases. It is the only hospital to perform adult heart transplants and is a recognized leader in cardiac obstetrics, heart rhythm services and heart valve procedures.

In 2007, Providence introduced the Heart + Lung Institute, which merges and integrates heart and lung research, education and care programs under one umbrella at St. Paul’s Hospital. In 2014, the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (located at St. Paul’s Hospital) was credited for the Treatment as Prevention strategy that now serves as the cornerstone of the United Nation’s plan to end HIV/AIDS globally. Together with HIV/AIDS treatment protocols also pioneered by the Centre for Excellence, Treatment as Prevention accounts for a 95% decrease in AIDS-related deaths in the province.

Today, St. Paul’s Hospital continues its 125-year tradition of providing compassionate care to people who need it most, focusing on the urgent and complex health needs of the community. Our commitment to patient- and family-centred care focuses on new knowledge and technology to support our patients.

St. Paul’s Hospital — An essential provincial resource

St. Paul’s Hospital serves both the local (Vancouver/Lower Mainland) and provincial population, providing non-specialized services primarily to the local population and specialized services to the entire province.

As one of two adult academic health sciences organizations in the province with affiliations with UBC and other B.C. post-secondary institutes, St. Paul’s Hospital is a renowned acute care hospital with a strong research and teaching focus, recognized provincially, nationally and internationally for its work.

Through its emphasis on the integration of evidence-based research, care and teaching, today St. Paul’s Hospital leads advancements in health care that not only improve the lives of people in B.C., but also set the standard for best practices around the world.

Projected Needs

As our population grows — in size, age and complexity of health care needs — the health care system needs to be ready. Investing in a new St. Paul’s Hospital state-of-the-art acute care hospital and integrated health campus will significantly contribute towards keeping people living in B.C. healthy in the future.

As part of our redevelopment planning process, we’ll be refining our understanding of the future health care needs for the populations St. Paul’s Hospital will continue to serve, and will develop programs and services to meet those needs accordingly.

To learn more about our planning and engagement process to get to this point, click here.

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