Cape Breton Regional Hospital expansion project still a few years away from completion

A major health-care construction project in Cape Breton is still years from completion.

The grounds next to the Cape Breton Regional Hospital are a major construction zone, with three new buildings in various stages of development.

“We have a new Cancer Centre, which will have two linear accelerators and multiple chemo bays,” said Troy Penney, clinical director of the $527 million redevelopment project.

A seven-storey structure will eventually be a new clinical services building - home to a new emergency department, operating rooms, a critical care department and 72 new inpatient beds.

Inside the new Cancer Centre next door, the idea is for it to be bright and spacious and to house the kind of technology that would allow specialists to treat more patients locally rather than off-Island.

“Thoracic surgeons, oncologists will actually come to Cape Breton to see our patients rather than our patients having to travel to Halifax in the future”, Penney said. “We see more medical oncologists being able to see patients here locally.”

“The Cancer Care Centre should be open to see its first patient in late 2027,” said Roy MacDonald, a project director with Build Nova Scotia.

The timeline for completion of the clinical services building is less clear.

MacDonald said about 150 tradespeople - the majority of them local - were on site during a guided tour for local media on Monday, but as many as 350 to 400 may be working during peak construction.

“It’s like a giant Lego with a million pieces, and every little piece has to be put together by a human being,” MacDonald said.

Project proponents added that this is the single biggest health care build the Island has seen since construction of the Cape Breton Regional Hospital itself - which was completed in 1995.

“It’s so important from a recruitment perspective to make sure that our new physicians, new nurses actually have state of the art facilities,” Penney said.

The back of the property is home to a new Energy Centre, which will heat and cool the other new builds.

As for anticipated challenges going forward, Penney said there will be a need for skilled trades.

“There’s a lot of unique skilled trades that we may need. We have H-VAC, electrical,” Penney said. We actually have some of those trades, but not maybe to this magnitude and scale.”

Still, those overseeing the expansion say things are more or less on track - even if the entire project is still a few years away from being complete.

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