Healthcare Infrastructure, Western Canada

This keynote will explore why well-intentioned healthcare projects drift into failure despite appearing “on track” and how AI can help expose risk patterns sooner.

This presentation will focus on:

• Identifying the systemic “blind spots” that start to accumulate on major capital healthcare projects
• Examining how this leads to a gap between reported project status and actual risk
• Exploring how AI can assist with early intervention
• Assessing what is required from a governance perspective to adapt and act on AI insights

This session will explore a critical step towards realizing the ‘smart hospital” concept.

• Identifying price escalation risk areas for healthcare infrastructure projects in the near and long term
• Assessing the current impact of cost escalation on projects across the country
• Anticipating other cost pressures stemming from the supply chain and government policies—both provincial and federal
• Factoring in fluctuating tariffs and current economic conditions into capital planning
• Budgeting best practices, especially for complex multi-phase development cycles

Cost pressures are being felt within healthcare organizations across the country as federal and provincial priorities shift. Capital projects are also feeling the pinch of escalating material costs and labour shortages.

This special fireside chat will examine how health authorities are strategically approaching the use of current funding streams to ensure financial stability and sustainability across the organization. Join us for a candid conversation about working with government as well as internal and external partners to effectively manage capital projects and ongoing operational needs.

This interactive panel comes just a few months after completion of Phase 1 of the $2.4B Burnaby Hospital Redevelopment Project. Phase 1 included the construction of a new pavilion and expansion of existing support buildings including the ER, operating rooms, and the MDRD.

Hear directly from the team tasked with activation and stabilization about their ‘go-live’ experience—from strategic pivots and lessons learned to prudent planning that led to successful outcomes for patients and staff.

Healthcare infrastructure is being planned in the midst of two simultaneous shifts: rapidly evolving standards that increase spatial and technical requirements, and policy momentum toward community-based and primary care models that may reduce institutional demand.

Functional programs still require specific bed counts and defined space standards, yet both the demand assumptions and the physical requirements underpinning them are moving targets.

This session presents a method for integrating evolving standards and system transformation assumptions into functional planning without defaulting to overbuilding or compromising safety intent.

Presenters will address how owners and planners can work within uncertainty, through a discussion on:

• How evolving standards are materially affecting program size and cost
  • Where dimensional increases, redundancy expectations, and interpretation layering are expanding footprints
  • Distinguishing true regulatory requirements from risk-driven precedent
  • Translating community care investment into defensible bed assumptions
• Introducing scenario-based demand modelling within functional programs
  • Applying economic concepts such as “bed elasticity” that link community capacity levels to institutional bed demand
  • Embedding uncertainty and standards into fundable functional programs
• Producing a reference case bed count with documented upper/lower envelopes
  • Aligning space planning decisions with both standards’ compliance and long-term economic feasibility
• Designing for flexibility without compromising safety intent
  • Sequencing build-out
  • Identifying where standards drive form versus where operational strategy can achieve the same objectives
  • Protecting future adaptability while maintaining sustainability

• Demonstrating how large-scale program consolidation and the introduction of new clinical services at the New St. Paul’s created opportunities to rethink how care is planned, organized, and delivered.
• Exploring how emerging and reconfigured programs—including the Centre for Healthy Aging, Rehabilitation, Maternity/NICU, and an integrated Surgical and Interventional platform—influence space planning, workflows, and adjacencies.
• Providing an overview of how approaches to standardization and flexibility shape both operational performance and long term adaptability across a highly integrated, single site centre for care.

When we design new healthcare facilities, it is of paramount importance that we focus on who we are designing for. Human Factors and Ergonomics gives us a scientific body of evidence and user centered design tools to help us do that.

This presentation will review practical examples of the human factors mindset and where it can be applied to your projects.