Swift Current Long-Term Care Centre

The Swift Current Long-Term Care Centre is the first project to be delivered by the government of Saskatchewan, using the P3 approach.

Plenary Health delivered a new 225-bed long-term care facility to replace the aging Swift Current Care Centre, The Prairie Pioneers Lodge, and The Palliser Regional Care Centre, which have served the community for many years.

The new facility, recently renamed “The Meadows”, is located on a 15-acre parcel adjacent to the regional hospital, and includes:

• Twenty-one 10 bed houses and one 15-bed hospice house (promoting home-like environment for residents)
• Adult Day Care
• Services Centre
• Link to Hospital

Design features

The facility design incorporates Lean design principles to deliver patient and family centered care and supports best practices in long-term care service delivery.

The Facility challenges the traditional model of large aged care facilities by utilizing the concept of 10 bed houses, each with its own kitchen, dining and lounge area. Residents can cook their own meals or be assisted by staff, all in a homelike environment that encourages collaboration and socialization amongst the many residents of the Facility.

The building plan features an innovative curved crescent shape that means long straight corridors are avoided. The resulting architecture creates a dynamic and varied streetscape externally and an internal building experience that is both interesting and mentally stimulating whilst maintaining good internal wayfinding.

Innovations

The design team successfully challenged several of the brief requirements with respect to the mechanical design of the facility. The resulting central heating and cooling system offers capital and operations cost savings removes many required maintenance activities from the residential houses.

Despite the size of the project and the undulations of the site, Plenary Group delivered a facility with no changes in level throughout the entire building – innovation valued by the client for its safety and logistical benefits. This also kept the option open to use AGV’s now or in the future.

The team is currently exploring the use of driverless Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV’s) to deliver the wide range of food and other consumables that need to be delivered to each house from the service building.

Local economic impacts

Through the construction phase of the contract, Plenary Health employed hundreds of local workers to deliver the new facility, and Johnson Controls will look to employ local staff in the operations phase.