The ribbon-cutting at the new MUHC Glen Campus will be the culmination of a dream to redefine healthcare in Quebec and Canada. In
this special edition of le Children magazine, we meet the man behind the dream: Dr. Nicolas Steinmetz, whose vision allows for new facilities and new services sick children couldn’t have hoped for in the hospital on Tupper street.
Dr. Steinmetz, could you tell us about the genesis of your vision for the new MUHC?
I was executive director of the Montreal Children’s Hospital in 1992 and the Foundation had just completed a capital campaign to put up a new building next to the existing one. I was supposed to start planning to get that done, and it struck me that this was crazy. The existing buildings were out of date. We couldn’t install new technology. Operating rooms were too small. The rising frequency of in-hospital infection had become noticeable. Looking at the other McGill hospitals, I thought they were the same or even worse. So I thought that we should just leave these buildings and build a new hospital.
What, then, was the first step on this long journey?
We got money from the Ministry of Health to do the planning, which began in 1995, and we got the money to buy the Glen land from CP. We were on track to build, but the PQ government delayed things. Finally, in June 2003 we got the go-ahead.
What did you see as the top priorities when planning the new MUHC?
The guiding principle was that it had to be a tertiary care hospital that was going to do only the hitech, complicated stuff. It had to be built in such a way that it would be flexible for the future, as the technology changes. It had to be a LEED building, environmentally friendly, with lots of light. It should be easy to get to and be a welcoming place. And it needed to have as broad a base of participation as possible. So we had 19 planning panels. In all, it took about a thousand people to create this plan.
With the complications you met along the way, was there ever a point when you thought that this project might not actually happen?
No. I accepted that it was going to get delayed, but the evidence of the need for this was so powerful and incontrovertible. And because it had such very wide participation, this was just not going to stop.
What did you feel the first time you saw a scale model of the project?
It was a very emotional moment for me. There were two models. I looked at both of them and at that point, it really became real for me. In the end, it looked a little different from the models, but that doesn’t matter.
Here we are now, almost a quarter-century after the first stirrings of this project. What do you think of what you see now at the old Glen Yard?
It’s very exciting to see that Quebec is going to get this kind of facility. Patients will be astonished at what this facility is able to do. And the McGill medical faculty will be able to do research in a more efficient way. It will be the only place in Canada that has a
clinical innovative medicine unit for trials of new medications and new procedures.
Is there any one feature of the new MUHC that you find most compelling, of which you are the most proud?
It’s going to have single-patient rooms, which means infection rates should plummet. Here you’ll have your own room with your own bathroom, where you’re not goin
g to contaminate anyone and no one’s going to contaminate you. But the whole thing is going to be unique and fantastic, so picking one thing is kind of difficult.
Are you concerned about future funding for the MUHC, as the province focuses on austerity?
The budget’s one thing, the health of a population and the building of something that will last for generations is another. Just because they need to balance their budget, which they do, doesn’t mean life doesn’t go on. Roads are going to get fixed and hospitals built.
You’ve been referred to in different circles as a visionary. How do you see yourself in all this?
I don’t really like to think of myself in that way very much. It’s my profound belief that it really takes as many people as it took to make this happen. At the beginning, when this idea was very fragile, I would tell people that if this baby has a thousand parents, it will never die.