A stand-alone Stollery Children’s Hospital is one step closer to reality, as the province has revealed where the building will be constructed.
The new Stollery will be at the northeast corner of 122 Street and 51 Avenue, on what is currently farmland on the University of Alberta’s South Campus.
The province said the field was chosen for its large size, potential for future expansion and proximity to the university’s existing hospital. The empty field will allow construction to begin without the need to demolish or relocate existing buildings.
The chosen spot is about two kilometres from the nearest transit centre — the South Campus/Fort Edmonton Park LRT and bus station.
The new Stollery Children’s Hospital will be located in south Edmonton, just off 51 Avenue and 122 Street.
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The province said planning is currently underway to determine the hospital’s size/space, service and infrastructure needs.
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The planning phase is anticipated to be complete in 2026. When the stand-alone hospital will be built and opened has yet to be determined.
Matt Jones, Minister of Hospital and Surgical Health Services, said hospitals are complicated infrastructure to design and build — and the province wants to get this right.
“Reliable timelines will have to wait until the functional programming and planning and design work is complete, and of course there’s decisions that are made in those processes that would impact the facility and timelines,” Jones said.
“For example, just a hospital bed tower — we’re evaluating three right now — would take five to eight years to build.
“So that should tell you that a stand-alone hospital will take at least five to eight years.”
That said, Jones indicated the province wants to fast-track the Stollery project, given the nearly constant high demand for beds.
Earlier this fall, several children had their in-patient chemotherapy sessions delayed because there were no beds for them to be admitted to.
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“The Minister of Infrastructure and I are working with our departments to see if we can expedite the construction of this particular hospital,” Jones said.
“I am concerned, for example, about NICU capacity across the province. I think we’ve already seen this year with the up to two-day delay in children receiving some chemo services due to space constraints here with sites competing for space.”
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Stollery Children’s Hospital solution for kid’s health includes eventual plan for standalone building
The provincial government began this process in 2021 with an initial $1 million, matched by the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation.
The 2024 provincial budget allocated $20 million over three years to advance plans for a stand-alone Stollery that would offer more beds, larger clinical spaces, more private rooms and dedicated areas for children and their families.
The province said last year’s provincial budget dedicated another $11 million over three years to further the planning and design work.
“This is a historic moment for kids’ health and for every family who has ever walked through the doors of the Stollery,” said Karen Faulkner, president and CEO of the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation.
“We are incredibly grateful to the Government of Alberta and the University of Alberta for making this land announcement possible.”
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The need for a bigger Stollery has been evident for many years.
The current Stollery Children’s Hospital opened in 2001 and is a hospital-within-a-hospital, physically existing inside part of the University of Alberta Hospital.
“A site within a site is always challenging because both sites have priorities,” Jones said. “We want to make sure that a modern, world-class facility with state-of-the-art equipment and functionally built children’s hospital — we think that’ll obviously improve care for children.”
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“We’ll also look at new capacity because, of course we can backfill the existing site with acute capacity. So it’s a win-win for all patients involved.”
The Stollery has 236 beds and is the second-largest children’s hospital in Canada after the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
It has among the highest inpatient volumes of any children’s hospital in Canada, according to the province, seeing about 300,000 children per year.
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The hospital sees 55,000 emergency room visits each year and performs about 12,000 surgeries.
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The facility is also Western Canada’s referral centre for pediatric cardiac surgery and a national leader in organ transplants for children.
The hospital serves families in a geographical area of more than 500,000 square kilometres.
Nearly 40 per cent of the patients at the Stollery come from outside of Edmonton.
The province said once the Stollery moves out, its former space inside the University of Alberta hospital will likely be converted back into space for adult patients.
“It is our intention to backfill the current space in this hospital with acute care, because of course we’re also seeing pressures due to a rapidly growing population that’s getting older and presenting with additional complexities,” Jones said.
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To mark the land announcement milestone, the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation is launching what it calls a once-in-a-generation fundraising campaign to raise $1 billion to transform children’s health called “No Bounds.”
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“This campaign will help build the new Stollery,” Faulkner said. “But it will also go further, because we believe kids deserve no bounds on their potential.
“Building a place from the ground up for kids will make care easier to access, allow for more spaces that reduce anxiety and heal hearts, and bring together the best minds in medicine, research and innovation.”
The foundation said No Bounds is its most ambitious fundraising endeavour yet.
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