Included in the Summary Report is a detailed description of the attributes of new health care facilities, against which our hospitals were compared. All five hospital sites suffer major deficiencies with regard to compliance with life safety codes, barrier-free design, and the separation of conflicting internal traffic. None of the facilities has either the building systems infrastructure or structural framework that can readily adapt or expand to meet future needs. All five sites are overdeveloped. Very little expansion space exists on most of the sites, and none if parking is taken into consideration.
All sites have insufficient parking.
Most of the existing hospitals suffer from poor accessibility, whether by car or by public transport. Only one, the Montreal Children's Hospital, is near the metro system. Site and building limitations have resulted in situations where functions have been installed wherever space could be found, rather than where they would be most appropriate. The resulting deficiencies in terms of functional adjacencies significantly hamper the ability of caregivers to communicate and interact effectively, and often impose hidden recurrent operational costs that far outweigh the expediency of the location selected. In all of the hospitals, the crucial adjacencies especially required between Emergency, Surgery, and Critical Care are non-existent.