Tender issued to remove banned building material from Montague hospital
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Plans are in the works to start removing asbestos from Kings County Memorial Hospital in Montague, P.E.I.
The provincial health authority says a recent assessment found several areas of the facility had been built with asbestos-containing materials that need to be taken out before planned renovations can proceed.
The province issued a tender for the work this week, and once it begins, officials estimate it will take about a month and a half to complete.
Tara Roche, Health P.E.I.'s administrator of community hospitals east, said the work is unlikely to affect services offered at KCMH.
"I don't anticipate it will impact patients much at all," said Roche. "Part of our priority was to ensure that."
Once a popular and fire-resistant insulation material, asbestos is commonly found in old roofing, tiles and similar products.
It's also carcinogenic. When asbestos is disturbed, it releases fine particles into the air, which have been associated with a variety of cancers when they are inhaled.
The hospital in Montague was built in 1971, before the use of asbestos was banned in many parts of the world. Canada prohibited its use in 1990.
More work to come
This is only Phase 1 of a broader plan to remove the material from the hospital. This time around, the province is budgeting $400,000 for work in the laundry, physiotherapy, storage and central sterile reprocessing (CSR) areas.
Those areas were prioritized because the CSR needed some upgrades and an assessment scored the other locations as being "high risk," Roche said.
"It tells us there is some asbestos around pipe, and there is some asbestos in some of our compound within our drywall — and some areas are more risky than others."
Roche said physiotherapy services will move elsewhere in the hospital, while some laundry and sterilization services will be shared by other Health P.E.I. facilities in the area.
The areas of the hospital where the work will be happening are mostly used by staff, she said, but the public will notice some barricades and other measures to seal off the removal zones. Roche said she is hoping work can begin in July or August.
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