One of the main ones involved the use of the Integrated Project Delivery Model, which featured collaboration between the health region, builder and design team and hadn’t been put to the test in the construction of a hospital facility in Canada.
As it turns out, Atkins and his fellow project leads were able to put the system to near-perfect use and ended up delivering what would become the Dr. F.H. Wigmore Hospital not only in a remarkably short amount of time but within the budget set by Five Hills.
This past Tuesday, Atkins was presented with the Lieutenant Governor’s Meritorious Achievement Award for his 40 years of engineering guidance in Saskatchewan and throughout North America, with his work on the Wigmore Hospital listed as one of his major achievements.
The honour is part of the Association of Consulting Engineering Companies Saskatchewan awards program and is presented to a resident of the province for ‘their outstanding achievements and contributions to the consulting engineering and geoscience industry in the province’.
“Any time you’re recognized by your peers, it’s quite an honour,” Atkins said in an interview from his home in Regina on Thursday. “I’ve held the others that are in the group in high regard and this is a nice testament to my involvement in the day-to-day business and the organization itself.”
While Atkins started as the lead mechanical engineer and was involved on the project’s executive committee, by the time the project reached its completion he had taken over as the lead representative for all disciplines. That put him front and centre when it came to how things went as the build reached its latter stages.
“It was a unique project,” Atkins said. “It was the first project delivered under the Integrated Project Delivery Model, so it was exciting being involved in something that’s first like that. I’ve been involved in health care design for a long time, so the health care aspects weren’t really new, but that aspect was certainly unique.”
The combined efforts of all parties following the new system resulted in something rather incredible -- the hospital started design in 2012, construction in 2013 and officially opened on Nov. 6, 2015. The $86 million project was completed in less than four years, an unheard-of turnaround time for such a large-scale build.
“It was delivered in an unbelievably short amount of time for that project,” Atkins said. “It was said to be a year ahead of schedule, but that’s a modest estimate of how fast it was done. Typically projects like that can take seven years or more from conception to operational, and we did it in under four years.”
Atkins pointed to the vision of those at the Five Hills Health Region as a major factor in the speed and success of the construction.
“They’d been introduced to the Integrated Project Delivery Model a couple years before that through conferences and speaking to people and they bought into it right from the get-go,” Atkins said. “They managed to convince the Ministry it was a good idea to pursue and they could see the benefits. I have to give them credit for pulling along the rest of the groups, the design and the construction community and convincing everyone that’s the way it should go… If everyone is convinced and singing from the same song page, good things can happen.”
As for his own work with the project, Atkins pointed to his team as one of the most crucial factors for pulling the whole thing off.
“We assembled our team so we had seasoned professionals from across many different disciplines and we also partnered with an architectural firm from the U.S. that had been part of these projects, and so did the general contractor,” he explained. “The combination of people with seasoned technical skills, the buy-in to the advantages of the contracting method and support of the U.S. companies helping with nuances of it, that helped a lot.
“You can’t cherry-pick one or two things, they all have to work together as a system and it’s not something for a neophyte to go into. You need people with considerable experience for something like this and we were fortunate to have that.”
To this day, with hundreds of builds behind him, the Dr. F.H. Wigmore Hospital ranks high among his successes.
“Certainly in top-10, that’s for sure,” Atkins said. “I’ve had the great fortune to be involved in lots of great projects. Knowing this was a really significant project for Moose Jaw and the area, it’s quite gratifying to be part of something that means so much to the community,”
