Construction of the first long-term care (LTC) home developed under Ontario’s Accelerated Build Pilot Program required collaboration, out-of-the-box thinking, careful planning and execution.
So how did the team pull it off in such a short period of time?
“To make it happen in 13 months, plus a few months for design, really required the client to make decisions; really needed the city to respond and work through the design very rapidly; and our design partners and our trade partners collaborating and working with us to make it happen. And that happened,” said Andre Bohren, construction manager with PCL Constructors Canada, who led the project.
The pilot program aims to deliver new LTC homes years sooner than a traditional development project through the use of hospital-owned land, rapid procurement and modular construction.
“Thirteen months in actuality, in terms of the amount of work, is probably translating into 18 months of effort, all compact, maybe even 20 months,” said Bohren.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ontario government introduced the pilot program to build new LTC homes as quickly as possible. The province, Infrastructure Ontario (IO) and Lakeridge Health partnered with PCL Toronto to build the new home on the site of Lakeridge Health’s Ajax Pickering Hospital.
Construction on Lakeridge Gardens began in January 2021 and the building achieved substantial performance at the beginning of March (2022). It’s a six-storey, 320-bed facility and is equipped with a sustainable green roof and energy efficient systems including an enhanced HVAC system. It is designed with wider corridors and each floor has four zones so if a resident gets sick, they can isolate the residential group in a specific zone.
PCL had to wear many hats throughout the project. The first steps involved working with the architects to do the design and get through the permitting process, which Bohren said is usually the most challenging part of but was made easier because of the collaboration.
“We had to work with our design team, Lakeridge and IO and the province to rapidly work through that process and ultimately be able to apply for permitting and then in parallel to that we’re managing the design so that we could start some of the modular elements,” he said.
“In order to make this thing work we went with some structural modular elements that we can then fabricate offsite while we were getting the site prepared and then our normal role as a constructor setting up and managing the site, the building itself, commissioning, turnover.”
One of the challenges PCL identified was the heliport at the hospital and its proximity to the site.
“We initially were going to use a number of tower cranes but they’re fixed and the challenges around that and the heliport were too great, so we went with mobile cranes,” Bohren said. “If the hospital let us know within 15 minutes…we could lower the cranes and allow for the helicopters to come in. We had to co-ordinate our work. So not only are we trying to erect a building, but we had to pay attention to flight traffic.”
Partway through the LTC build, Lakeridge decided to upgrade the heliport as well and shut it down for a period of time.“That was mostly in relation to the other challenge which was parking and access to the site,” Bohren noted. “The Lakeridge site is bound on all four sides and the amount of parking spaces are limited so Lakeridge has been adding on a parking structure. It’s right in the middle of the flight path…so they did a shut down and an upgrade.”
“The other challenge was the utilities coming into the site. They take up a space so our lay down area was pretty limited as to where we could stockpile material. There wasn’t enough space to stockpile earthwork soils,” he added. “We had to be very precise on how we moved earth and then put it back or trucked it out.”
To meet the tight timeline, the team used modular construction elements in the building.
“Construction activity started in the second week of January,” Bohren said. “We moved very quickly into the foundations and the slab on grade while in parallel the washroom pods, the precast and the structural walls were being fabricated off site. We were essentially building everything at once.”
During the height of the project, 500 to 600 people were working onsite every day, with crews working a morning and afternoon shift seven days a week with a small break on Sunday afternoon.
“We had to make sure we had the right team in place,” said Bohren. “With an accelerated build it’s really people intensive.”
To see a video of the project visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpw-diUGOPg.
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