We need clear P3 guidelines, architects say

“We are at a crucial point in this country about the success of P3s (public-private partnerships) in this country,” says architect Aian Allas of Parkin Architects. “The process has to be simplified and standards established.”

Learn from U.K. experience

BY IRWIN RAPOPORT

DCN CORRESPONDENT

QUEBEC CITY

Allas was one of several speakers at a lecture entitled New Trends in Canadian Health Care Architecture, held at the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s annual general meeting in Quebec City recently.

Reviewing the British experience with P3s (PFIs), which began with the Conservative government in the early 1990s, Allas stated that it did not look promising from the start and time was needed to hone the process and identify problems.

“Our builders have not attuned themselves to P3s and what they mean,” he said. “You should not do this on speculation. The first architects in Britain basically went bankrupt. The pursuit costs are still very substantial (when) they are carried by their components.”

Parkin, a firm that specializes in health care projects, visited several British P3 projects prior to getting involved with the consortium put together for the William Osler Health Centre, and found the situation had since changed for the better with the process via the Swindon Hospital.

“They know now that you have to involve the user,” said Allas. “They managed expectations and integrated all their teams from day one. That huge facility was designed and built in three years. We can’t do that here.”

Allas said P3 does not translate into “poor” design, pointing out high standards have to be set and a lot of work done between the award and implementation of these projects. The British, he said, learned that: poor design led to excessive design; risk factors had to be lowered; poor quality led to over-prescribed specifications; slow construction was attributed to lack of user involvement; and startup delays based on cost pressures and cutbacks led to the lack of innovation.

“They learned from that,” he said. “We have to learn from that again. I believe there is a future for P3s in Canada. (The British) have now developed standard documents for RFQs, for output specifications, for contracts—they have sped up and simplified the process and created generic economic models.

“(While) we have created our own, not just once, but three times at least already,” he added, “they learned lessons from post-occupancy studies that have been applied to P3s—they have a standardized maintenance mechanism. We don’t have that here, and they speeded up their procurement process.”

Allas stressed that instead of designing grand projects, design and build what is necessary. Governments should underwrite P3 projects as is done in the U.K., and international interest should be sought as Canada does not have sufficient resources “to do it ourselves.”

Richard Eaves of Murphy Hilgers Architects provided some of his firm’s experiences with Brampton’s proposed William Osler Heath Care Centre, one of two P3 projects the Ontario government approved in 2001.

“It is one of those projects that we thought we had and saw it go out the window,” said Eaves.

“P3s are very much performancebased, with much of the emphasis and focus on innovation. We worked very closely with all the clinical users of the hospital to establish very detailed needs and incorporate them into documents.”

Eaves provided an insight into the process, explaining how the outward specifications were developed and how the complexity of the rules and the need to design and integrate clinical and nonclinical areas was essential.

“The compliance review stage is taking place right now,” he said. “The schematic designs have been done. We are currently working on the design element and there will be reviews during the contract document stage, where there will be monitoring by the compliance team during the construction, which is yet to be determined.”

The ongoing process is providing many lessons for the future of P3s in Ontario.

“The RFP for the project was issued at the end of the schematic design and the opportunities were there for proponents to come up with a lot of innovation,” said Eaves. “But in reality, there was not a huge amount of innovation. One possibility is that the RFQ be issued at the end of the design stage and the drawings handed over to the consortium’s architect to prepare contract documents then build.

“The (ongoing) detailed design review is becoming a very labourious process to figure which rules are being broken and how to address that, whether to allow changes, and the users are being dragged into the process again and are now working with a different group of architects, so there is a lot of confusion going on.”

Eaves says that clear ministry rules for the P3 process are needed, pointing out that there were opposing views within the ministry when the P3 process was being put together.

“We still don’t have any clear directions,” he said. “Provincial/Canadian health care guidelines are still very much needed and I understand that the first steps have been taken to achieve them. The question of risk obviously comes up a lot. A couple of the bidders on this project felt there was an uneven amount of risk passed on to them.

“There was certainly a disconnect between the facility and the service requirements—the two parts were certainly done in isolation and they did not work well in integrating capital and operating issues,” Eaves explained, noting that “there was still a lot of public mistrust of the whole notion of private health care. It’s really necessary for hospitals and the ministry to educate the public better in this respect.”

Speaking about the B.C. experience with P3s, architect Bruce Raber, from Vancouver-based Stantec Architecture, addressed his firm’s role in the development of the Abbottsford Regional Hospital and Cancer Care Centre project— B.C.’s sole experiment with P3s.

Hired by the consortium as a technical adviser to the project, Raber witnessed much of the inner working of the process for the 60,000-square-metre, 300-bed hospital to cost about $300 million. It’s the first cancer centre to be built in B.C. from the ground up.

“The health care authority will own the facility and the land from the start,” Raber said. “The (private) partner will be responsible for the design, finance, the building, maintaining and operating the management services, and all the capital and facility operating costs.”

Having entered the process late, Raber says his firm is making an impact.

“Architects are an essential partner in these projects,” he said. “Unfortunately in P3s, a lot of it is driven by the commercial and legal (aspects) and in Abbottsford, they spent years looking at what was going on in Australia, England and Ontario, and the lawyers and the accountants had a great time with it. In their mind they could have done without architects and engineers.

“We had to fight for turf to show where we could contribute,” he added.