By Greg Higgins

Construction on new Sask. Hospital will include focus on patient-friendly aesthetics

May 3, 2016 | 5:00 PM

The patients and staff at the current Saskatchewan hospital describe it as “depressing, confined and no good” but there’s hope those descriptors will change when the new facility opens in 2018.

“This is absolutely a patient first venture,” Linda Shynkaruk, the hospital’s director, said. “For patients and staff I think it is very important for the new facility to have a therapeutic feel to it. It’s going to be very bright, very calming. Also having new equipment and furniture will help boost patients and staff.”

Shynkaruk surveyed numerous patients who said they want more natural light, more privacy, more bathrooms and temperature control.

“I want patients to feel welcome, I want them to feel safe and I want them to have the right to seek treatment in a beautiful calming home like environment,” she said.

Though a lot of the patients at the Saskatchewan Hospital come through the courts as offenders that isn’t the case for every patient.

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“It is simply patients that are treatment resistive, have long standing mental illnesses who are in need of a little bit long-term stabilization,” Shykaruk said.

“I came here in 2009 but I have a revolving door,” Camelle Carlton, a patient at the hospital said. “I have been dismissed twice but had to keep coming back because I couldn’t handle the stresses of the real world. They always accepted me back to help rehabilitate me. This time around I’ve been here a year and six months.”

Carlton has schizophrenia along with addictions to drugs and alcohol.

“I think patients will be a lot more sprite and happy in the new facility,” Carlton said. “I think it will make them more committed to their treatment program and compliant with medication orders and try to heal as well as they can.”

Though Carlton admitted the facility seems like a place she could be happy with for the rest of her life she does plan on being dismissed again and giving it another go in “the real world.”

The new facility will have 284 beds, the majority of which will be private rooms. The hospital has designated 188 beds for the hospital section while the other 96 will be secure beds for male and female offenders living with mental health issues. There will be no more than two patients sharing a bathroom.

Construction began in September of 2015. The project is on schedule and on budget for completion in the spring of 2018.  

ghiggins@jpbg.ca

@realgreghiggins