A proposal to expand the Emergency Room and Intensive Care Unit at GR Baker Memorial Hospital in Quesnel was laid out to City Council this week.
Micheal McMillan, the Chief Operating Officer for the Northern Interior, says it is desperately needed.
He calls the current space “woefully inadequate.”
Built in 1986, McMillan says it is very small and very outdated.
He says they don’t have treatment rooms with adjacent washrooms which is absolutely a standard these days, no ceiling lifts to help staff move patients, no private rooms and no crisis intervention room,
McMillan says there is also no isolation capacity to deal with infectious diseases.
Finally McMillan says while he knows staff would step it up and make it work the existing space is not really designed to handle massive casualty events like the mill explosions in Burns Lake and Prince George.
A proposal for this project has now been submitted to the Provincial Government.
