Few know the scale of this better than Ramona Fonseka, Chief Clinical Planner for Redevelopment at Royal Columbian Hospital. “There are thousands of items, everything from medical instruments to the amount of PPE a hospital needs,” she explains. “Anything and everything required to run a hospital has to be in place for first patient day.”
Her team, together with activators and superusers from across the hospital, is working floor by floor to ensure every piece is installed, tested, and ready before opening day.
Activators & superusers
Those activators, experienced clinicians and operational experts, are validating room layouts, confirming equipment placement, and ensuring the full inventory of supplies is exactly where care teams will expect it.
Superusers, meanwhile, are preparing to be the first wave of staff trained on new equipment, new technologies, and new workflows unique to the Tower. These champions will guide colleagues through orientation, troubleshooting, and readiness activities in the months and weeks before opening.
“What staff need most is orientation to the space, how to function and work within it, how to react, how to go and find the Code Blue button, where the crash cart is,” says Fonseka. “Then there’s training on new and different equipment that we don’t have access to in our current space.”
Supporting all of this is Health Care Relocations (HCR), a global leader in hospital moves. For HCR Senior Project Manager Cameron Goes, this is a signature project.
“We’ve done a lot of projects all over the world,” he says. “This will certainly be the biggest in BC’s history.”
A donor-funded robotic surgical system is among the advanced equipment being moved into the Jim Pattison Acute Care Tower.
Patient-transfer day
HCR’s role is both meticulous and mission-critical. The team plans how departments will ramp down in their current spaces, sequences the move of equipment carefully, and orchestrates a single-day transfer of more than 300 patients into the new Tower.
“You can’t snap your fingers and have all your people and equipment over there,” Goes explains. “We bring a phased approach to department moves so that services can ramp down, cut over efficiently, and ramp back up to the levels needed for the public.”
On patient-transfer day, dozens of teams, including Registration, Clean Team, Security, transport teams, and unit-based clinical staff, will work in tightly choreographed cycles.
“We implement a very efficient patient transfer process where all the patients move in essentially one day,” says Goes. Every team member will wear colour-coded T-shirts identifying their role, an approach honed through years of experience. “Everyone stays in their role, and we get the job done.”
Before that day arrives, the hospital will run a full patient-transfer rehearsal. This is an essential test of routes, timing, communication processes, elevator access, and staffing.
“We do it to gain that experience perspective,” Goes says. “We want to actually test it with equipment and a bed. Something can look good on paper, but in real time it may look a little different.”
Future of care
Across the hospital, anticipation is building, not only for the building’s advanced technology, expanded capacity, and single-patient rooms, but for the sense of calm and dignity the new environment will offer.
“With the Jim Pattison Acute Care Tower, one of the pieces people will sense right away is how spacious and inviting the main entrance is, says Fonseka. “Access to natural light, beautiful single rooms, alcoves for families, we finally have a hospital that will match the exceptional care that is provided here.”
Ramona Fonseka, Chief Clinical Planner for Redevelopment
The move into the Jim Pattison Acute Care Tower is far more than a logistical event. It reflects the precision, care, and dedication that define Royal Columbian’s provincial role. When the doors open, patients and families will step into a modern, thoughtful, purpose-built environment, one shaped by thousands of hours of preparation and a shared commitment to exceptional care.