Brandon Sun - PRINT EDITION
“We don’t want that to happen again. We want to, of course, have a safe environment and we’re going to make sure that whatever solution we have ... to make sure that that potential could … never be there again.”
— Brandon RHA CEO Brian Schoonbaert
For those Brandon folks walking up to the Brandon Regional Health Centre for a coffee or a visit with a relative, you will notice a few changes in the hospital’s main atrium.
New panes of tempered glass have recently been installed to form a “mock-up” security barrier on the second floor balcony overlooking the atrium below.
While they may visually detract somewhat from the original open-air design of the atrium balcony’s, we believe safety is a more important consideration. And to be fair, so does the hospital’s administration.
As the Sun reported yesterday, the mock-up design includes steel braces that have been attached to the existing hand-railing and hold a heavy, tempered glass. Plans for the barriers have been in the works for quite some time, and Brandon RHA CEO Brian Schoonbaert said it has taken longer to create a suitable design that uses the existing structure as much as possible.
Had better safety features been part of the original design, Schoonbaert said it would have been done differently.
“But we haven’t so it takes a little bit more work,” he said.
The installation of safety glass follows a pair of separate critical incidents in which two people propelled themselves from the fourth floor onto the atrium floor. In both cases, there were many people sitting at tables and visiting in the atrium area.
On July 8, 2011, a 31-year-old man fell from the fourth floor into the hospital atrium and landed on a patient.
The patient suffered broken bones, while the man who jumped later died of traumatic injuries due to the fall. The man had been a psychiatric patient at some point, but was not a hospital patient at the time.
About six months before that incident, on Dec. 31, 2010, a 51-year-old woman fell from the fourth floor to her death. She was a patient at the Centre for Adult Psychiatry nearby and was on leave from the centre at the time. The woman’s death had been deemed an isolated incident so it was believed there was no need for structural changes to the hospital.
The current design of the hospital complex was apparently borne out of necessity — the hospital is a combination of newer and older buildings, and the atrium’s balconies were left open to accommodate heating and ventilation needs, not because it was more esthetically pleasing.
Nevertheless, after the first death, then-CEO Carmel Olson had told the Sun that the railings on the hospital atrium stairway had been built higher than what was required by existing building codes.
Since the second incident, however, the hospital has been working to correct the situation. And over the last 10 months while a permanent solution was being planned, temporary Plexiglass barriers were installed on the third-, fourth- and fifth-floor balconies. As well, the atrium staircase from the second floor up has been closed for security purposes.
This has obviously caused some inconvenience for patients and hospital staff, but the staircase will be included in the permanent barrier plan and will be opened up again once installed.
But as inconvenient as the situation may be, preventing anyone else from hurting themselves and thus traumatizing other patients, staff and visitors is a worthy goal. And from what we can see, the new mock-up design still allows for free air flow around the barriers.
It’s a generally good design we believe it will serve the hospital well. Once completed, likely later this summer, the new safety barriers will give us all a little more peace of mind.
Republished from the Brandon Sun print edition May 5, 2012
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“We don’t want that to happen again. We want to, of course, have a safe environment and we’re going to make sure that whatever solution we have ... to make sure that that potential could … never be there again.”
— Brandon RHA CEO Brian Schoonbaert
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“We don’t want that to happen again. We want to, of course, have a safe environment and we’re going to make sure that whatever solution we have ... to make sure that that potential could … never be there again.”
— Brandon RHA CEO Brian Schoonbaert
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