With the sod-turning ceremony marking the beginning of a new phase of construction for a new Estevan Regional Nursing Home, questions still abound as to what exactly that'll look like.
At the ceremony held on Friday, Don Kindopp, the chair of the New Estevan Nursing Home Committee, was joined by others in the community including Estevan MLA Lori Carr and Councilor Shelley Veroba.
He says that the new progress they've made is great after almost two decades of work.
"It's like looking in the rear mirror, there's lots behind us, but you have to go and look forward. So this is a milestone. So to me, it indicates another step on a new journey and now we get into more of the design. We know where it's gonna be located, but with the designer, what's it gonna look like, what's it going to encompass, that sort of thing."
Lindopp says that now they're looking to keep pressure on the province to continue the project which moves further into their field.
"So now it becomes, I would suggest more of a political action and also because of the fact we've gone from what we hoped would be 70 beds new construction to 129 beds, that's almost double the size. So the required fundraising has to be looked at now because of the size increase and because of inflation and we know that things are not going down, the price of that."
That additional fundraising may be a point of pain with the committee as the province wants to see a certain amount raised by the community for the project.
Kindopp says a potential solution could be to use a preexisting design from recent nursing home construction for the project.
"We're also going to have to look at how can we build this in a better, more efficient way rather than do we have to design it from the bottom up? Are there, not enough plans out there already that we could just bring them down here and put them on this space? Rather than have to go right back to where you start drawing the floor plans of that."
Kindopp cited recent construction projects in Radville, as well as those in other provinces such as BC, though he stated they don't have any agreements in the project with other provinces or their designs.
As the work continues he says that the committee will continue to be a factor in the building of this new nursing home.
"We like to be properly informed and considered on what's happening and allow us to look at that and have any input into it. So the committee was asked by the government to make the decision what we're going to do here. We're going to look at building over in the St. Joseph's property. We're going to look at green space property."
Kindopp says that as treatments associated with old age get more complex, and younger people can develop issues associated with old age, a new style of care in the nursing home might be considered as part of the design.
"In terms of what we think of long-term care is being elders and however you define an elder, that white hair or certain age limit, I don't know, but we find that in long-term care there are younger years coming in there so that they'll be there for 10, 20, 30 years, whereas someone goes in there with 82, they're only in there for a shorter length of time of that. So I don't want to curse anybody on saying that, but yeah."
While an estimated cost has not yet been released for the new nursing home Kindopp says that the work could be a big ask for Estevan.
"They're going to have to start looking at debating funding models in that, you know, is that not more so than maybe the responsibility of the province, the people of the province to take over more of that and not relieve the responsibility of the community, but to make it fair. I would think that probably we estimated 40 million, 70 million dollars and that was 10 years ago."
"I think inflation and that has more than doubled that, probably tripled that sort of thing there. With 129 beds too, I'm sure we're looking at triple that. So that means we raised 8 million, so we now have to raise 24 million I think that's a really huge challenge for this community."