Hospital helipad being moved to accommodate more parking spaces

By Tina Comeau

THE VANGUARD

NovaNewsNow.com

The helipad at the Yarmouth Regional Hospital is being moved to make room for more parking spaces.

The need for increased parking is something South West Health says it has been looking to address for a long time. It is optimistic the construction being carried out will not cause disruption to the public and staff and says the end result will be more much-needed parking. The health district says 120 new spaces will be added to the south parking lot.

“For patients, visitors and people who need to come to the hospital, this work shouldn’t impact them at all,” says communications director Fraser Mooney about the construction phase. “But at the end of it we’re going to have more parking so it’s going to mean more accessibility for everybody.”

Excavation work has gotten underway this week – the work is being carried out by Aberdeen Paving – and is expected to take about two months. During this time air ambulances will land at the Yarmouth airport and Emergency Health Services will transport patients to the hospital by ambulance. The new location for the helipad will still be in the same general area where it was, but it will be pushed back towards the harbour.

“There’s a slope there so we’re going to have to fill in that area,” Mooney says. “So there is going to be quite a bit of work over the next couple of months or so.”

The health district isn’t concerned over the additional time it will take to transport patients by ambulance from the airport.

“It’s going to be a slightly longer time delay from the time they land to the time they get to the emergency department but we don’t think that’s going to create too many problems,” says Mooney.

In a memo distributed to staff and physicians at the hospital Wednesday about the new parking project, South West Health says the work will result in additional parking spaces for staff, however Mooney says the new spaces will be for staff, physicians, volunteers and the public, although the health district does encourage patients and visitors to use the north parking area closer to Vancouver Street when possible.

And while the health district doesn’t anticipate too much disruption in the upcoming weeks, this doesn’t mean there won’t be any impact. Because of heavy trucks and equipment that will be moving in and out, the health district will have to eliminate about 20 to 30 spaces from the south side parking lot during the construction. Hospital staff is being asked to park in the Grove Road parking lot during this time, an area that many staff already use for parking.

Meanwhile there’s been some grumblings over how the helipad can be moved to accommodate parking, but it couldn’t be moved to accommodate a new Tidal View nursing home, which will be built off of the hospital site. But despite a report once presented to Yarmouth Town Council that outlined “political issues with displacing the helicopter pad and a significant number of parking spots” as an impediment to putting the project on site, Mooney says that was not the case and in fact the health district delayed its parking project while it worked with the Tidal View board on a possible hospital site location.

“We were always quite clear in our dealings with Tidal View that we would do whatever we could to accommodate having their new building located on our site, this included relocating the helipad and altering our parking if required,” he says. Mooney notes the health district got approval for its business planning process last fall, which is when it could have moved forward with the project that has been in the planning stages for well over a year.

“We actually delayed our planned parking lot expansion that we’re doing now,” he says. “It was delayed until it was quite clear that Tidal View was not going to remain on site.”

Gordon Wood of the Tidal View board agrees that the health district did what it could to accommodate them and that the helipad was not the deciding issue.

“They were very cooperative with us. They wanted us to stay on the property as much as we wanted to stay when we started,” he says, but in the end the board had to look beyond the hospital grounds because, Wood says, the land available would have made things too tight for the project. “The area was just too small and it just didn’t meet the criteria for the new nursing home,” says Wood.