People hoping to receive eye care at the Innisfail Health and Care Centre this month will have to wait a little bit longer for the services.
Construction is currently stalled on the expansion project, meant to bring ophthalmology (eye) surgeries to Innisfail.
Kerry Bales, senior vice-president for Alberta Health Services (AHS) central zone said they've “run into a little bit of an unexpected delay.”
He said AHS was recently notified that the contracted construction company had run into problems with receivership.
“What we're trying to do now is work through the steps with the receiver and construction company to see how we're going to get the project moving again and finish the construction.”
Renovations to the tune of $1 million began in the hospital late last year to convert what was a storage room and patient room area into the surgery and clinic with the original intention of opening sometime this July. The program will bring surgeries back to Innisfail after the doors of the operating room closed six years ago.
Bales said he doesn't know exactly how far along the construction was but said they were nearing completion.
Within the next few weeks he hopes to have a clearer idea of when construction will start up again, but said opening any time this summer is completely off the table.
“It won't happen this summer,” he said. “What we would be hoping for is sometime early fall, but at this point it's tough to say. Depending on how the process plays out it could be later this fall as well.”
The surgery expansion project is part of a $16.7-million plan to increase the number of high-priority surgeries in Alberta by 5,000 a year. The ophthalmology services are moving to Innisfail to free up capacity for more complex surgeries performed in Red Deer, with eye surgeries being offered in Innisfail three times a week.
A retinal clinic as well as outpatient services to accommodate a variety of ophthalmology conditions will be available as well.
“This is an unfortunate delay; it hasn't changed the course of the plans,” said Bales. “We're just trying to focus on getting this done so we can get the service up and running.”
