A proposed extended care building for female patients will help Nanaimo’s Edgewood treatment centre look the part of a world class facility, said its executive director.
“[Right now] we have converted houses and we want to take them down and put up something more in feeling with the campus,” said Lorne Hildebrand, executive director for the addiction treatment centre. “There would be no immediate short-term benefits other than the fact that a world-class centre needs to look like a world-class centre.”
Edgewood is asking city officials to tweak its official community plan to allow for a new building on its growing Boxwood Road campus.
The new facility is still in the planning stages, but is expected to replace two converted houses with a larger building to host administration and extended care beds for women.
It would be a smaller project than the recently opened $3.8 million Jane Ferguson Building, which can house 55 family program participants and male clients.
According to Hildebrand, the new building would add two beds to the women’s extended care centre, but make it more modern, clean and easy to supervise.
It would also give the centre’s administration room to grow.
With Edgewood now reaching into other markets like Calgary and Seattle, it could need more space for staff at its head office, he said.
“Over the next five to 10 years there is no question there will be growth for Edgewood in other parts of Canada and the U.S., but certainly growth here in Nanaimo because we essentially have all the things that supports a [growing] organization here,” he said.
This would be the fourth expansion at Edgewood since the residential addiction treatment program first opened in 1994 as a 42-bed addiction treatment facility. It can now house 85 in-patients, as well as 40 in extended care.