Shiny new Interior Heart and Surgical Centre almost ready to save lives

KELOWNA – The Interior Heart and Surgical Centre at Kelowna General Hospital is a technical marvel that you hope never to have to visit but are sure glad is there when you need it.

“This facility is the icing on the cake that is KGH,” says Kelowna-Lake Country MLA Norm Letnick, who was on hand for the sneak peak. 

The four-floor facility is the first to open outside Victoria and the Lower Mainland and will contain 11 operating rooms and two more dedicated to cardiac surgery on the second floor. It will serve patients from throughout the Southern Interior.

The operating rooms average 60 square metres and are much larger than the operating rooms in the old facility, allowing for easier access and movement of patients, staff and equipment. 

One hybrid operating room is set up with advanced medical imaging devices, allowing less invasive surgical procedures to be performed.

Supporting them are 22-post anaesthetic recover room bays and eight cardiac surgery intensive care unit private rooms.

The entire third floor is dedicated to the medical device reprocessing department where all instruments and equipment can be decontaminated, inspected, maintained and stored.

The first floor is for pre-op and day surgery and contains 42 private bays as well as family rooms and meeting rooms for clinical staff.

Although it won’t open until next spring, a new maternity and neonatal intensive care unit will take up the fourth floor. It will contain five labour and delivery rooms, 17 in-patient beds, a Caesarean section operating room as well as two operating room assessment and recovery beds and three early labour assessment beds.

The $381-million facility was funded by the provincial Ministry of Health ($296 million) and the Central Okanagan Regional Hospital District ($85 million).

The surgical centre is not scheduled to open until Sept. 28 however the Interior Health Authority is giving locals a chance to tour the shining new facility without having to go through a surgical wait list. Tours are available between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., Saturday, June 20.

To contact the reporter for this story, email John McDonald at jmcdonald@infonews.ca or call 250-808-0143. To contact the editor, email mjones@infonews.ca or call 250-718-2724.