Bridgepoint Health

Location

The hospital is located next to the Don River in the Riverdale neighbourhood of the city and includes the historic Don Jail which is now the administration building for the new hospital. The exact address is 14 St. Matthews Road, Toronto, Ontario at the corner of Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street. The new building towers over the east side of the Don Valley Parkway.

History

The House of Refuge was built on the site in 1860 as a home for "vagrants, the dissolute, and for idiots". The facility became the Riverdale Isolation Hospital in 1875 during a smallpox epidemic. It became a specialized facility located on the edge of the city to house patients with communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis. As times changed, in 1957, the hospital's name and mandate were changed; its focus was shifted to helping those with chronic ailments and/or needing rehabilitation, as The Riverdale Hospital. The artchitecturally distinctive brown brick "half-round" Riverdale Hospital - which become Bridgepoint Health in 2002 - was completed in 1963; was amalgamated structurally into the new Bridgepoint Active Healthcare campus. In 1997 as part of Mike Harris' cutbacks the government moved to close the original facility, but a community lobbying effort kept it open, and saved the historic Riverdale Hospital building.

Redevelopment

In 2003, a $200 million expansion project was announced, that modernized and expanded the facility. The final result is the purpose-built, 10-storey, 404-bed Bridgepoint Hospital building, which is connected by a glass walkway to the old Don Jail, used for administrative offices. The former Don Jail was demolished in 2014 as part of the Bridgepoint redevelopment project.

The Community Master Plan, approved by the City of Toronto in 2006, is based on a unique 'campus of wellness', which reflects exciting concepts from architecture, landscaping, and medical best practices to not just transform the site, but to change the healthcare system to better meet the life-long needs of people living with multiple health conditions - or "complex chronic disease". The new, state-of-the-art facility serves as a "living lab" to foster the next generation of clinicians, researchers and educators who will work together to advance our understanding and treatment of complex chronic disease. It serves as a research base for the Bridgepoint Collaboratory for Research and Innovation, which is one of the only research enterprises in the world to focus exclusively on complex chronic disease.

Bridgepoint Active Healthcare and Infrastructure Ontario have partnered with Plenary Health to design, build, finance and maintain the new facility for 30 years after completion. Construction started in the fall of 2009, and has been fully operational since April 2013.

Patient services moved to the new hospital building on April 14, 2013. The 10-storey hospital incorporates with the former Don Jail (c. 1858), which serves as the administrative wing of the hospital. Two teams of architects are responsible for the two-tiered project design and delivery under Infrastructure Ontario’s Alternate Financing and Procurement program: Stantec Architecture / KPMB Architects, Planning, Design and Compliance Architects; HDR Architecture / Diamond Schmitt Architects, Design, Build, Finance and Maintain Architects.