The new Women’s Hospital, located at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg, is on a brownfield site adjacent to the existing campus. The project includes one level of underground parking, with tunnel and bridge connections to the rest of the campus. The new facility consolidates women’s health services from multiple sites at HSC Winnipeg into a single facility that includes ambulatory care clinics, birthing facilities and women’s surgery suite, inpatient units and a large NICU.
The hospital is designed to meet the needs of women and their families. It is warm and welcoming and designed to be respectful of patients’ need for privacy as well as providing multiple opportunities for interpersonal connections and support. The ambulatory care clinics are located at ground level and incorporate systems furniture at reception areas in order to facilitate future reconfiguration. Because all the women’s health care services have been dispersed across the campus until now, there was a recognition that new synergies between programs would emerge only once they were all collocated and changes in physical configuration would most likely be necessary. All patients are accommodated in single rooms with support spaces for families in every bedroom. The NICU has five pods of ten bassinets each with central work facilities for staff and family spaces located along the perimeter of the building. The interior design of the hospital was chosen to support the variety of cultures and backgrounds of the patients and their families who represent many indigenous communities and a diverse community of recent immigrants.
Project category: New construction
Chief administrator: Cheryl Edwards, project director, capital planning, Winnipeg Regional Health Authority
Firm: Parkin Architects Limited, www.parkin.ca
Design team: Parkin Architects Limited (clinical planning and interior design), in association with
Architecture 49 (core and shell)
Total building area (sq. ft.): 388,500
Construction cost/sq. ft.: $599
Total construction cost (excluding land): $232.9 million
Completed: November 2019
