BellevilleGeneral HospitalFoundation

The Charlotte Sills Wing

Bigger, brighter and better-designed, Quinte Health Care’s new Charlotte Sills Wing is open. The $99.5-million effort began in March 2007 and was completed on time and on budget. It’s named for the late Charlotte Sills, a city resident who, upon her 1961 death, left no direct heirs. Her estate in 1972 left $2 million to the foundation and $1 million to the hospital. The funds were invested and grew into $16 million.

The Sills Wing houses rehabilitation space for such outpatient treatments as physiotherapy and speech therapy; a complex continuing care inpatient unit; and a children’s treatment centre and pre-school speech department.

The wing increases the hospital’s size by 35 per cent, adding more than 155,000 square feet of new construction. Its rooms are bigger, brighter and better-designed than facilities elsewhere on the site. The children’s treatment centre, for example, was a darker space in QHC’s tired, leaky Cavell block.

The new wing is only part of a bigger picture of expansion in Belleville. That expansion’s second and third phases are expected to cost a combined total of about half that of the first. The second phase is to include a new addition for emergency rooms and labs plus renovations to the cancer and heart care respectively units. A third phase promises new operating rooms and a mental health unit sometime in 2014.