MONTREAL -- A new psychiatry unit is officially open at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital.
The Carole and Andrew Harper Psychiatry Inpatient Unit outsizes the hospital’s former site by around 1,000 square metres – allowing for a significant upgrade in services and facilities, according to Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg, the president of CIUSSS West-Central Montreal.
The site – located on the hospital’s third floor – includes 48 private rooms, including a designated geriatric section; four intake rooms that allow for privacy during meetings between patients and professionals; family conference rooms; an occupational therapy room and three activity centres.
Rosenberg says the new facilities represent the hospital’s “dedication to delivering mental-health services in surroundings that are bright, airy, respectful of privacy and conducive to healing.”
“In this setting, we can more effectively treat and view the patient as a whole person, who is seen not only as an individual, but as someone whose recovery is based on strengthening their connection to their family and the wider community,” Rosenberg added.
The new unit is situated where the hospital’s operating rooms were located from the 1930s to 2016.
“In order for us to create the modern facility that you are in today, an enormous amount of painstaking demolition had to take place,” Rosenberg said during the unit’s inauguration ceremony on Monday. “You might even say the creation of this unit was the result of the most extensive and most creative feat of reconstructive surgery in this hospital’s history.”
Andrew Harper, whose donation made the new unit possible, is described as a generous man who wanted to support the hospital in its fight against mental illness.
“His goal was to help those who need help the most,” Larry Sidel, the JGH Foundation’s executive vice-president, said in a statement.
