To combat the pressures of COVID-19 on the Province of Ontario’s long-term care sector, Infrastructure Ontario and Lakeridge Health partnered with PCL Toronto to build a new long-term care home. What was the challenge? The home was required to be completed in months, years faster than a traditional build project. While PCL Toronto is no stranger to completing a rigorous construction schedule, the client’s accelerated build timeline required out-of-the-box thinking and a near-perfect strategy.

Lakeridge Gardens, Lakeridge Health’s new long-term care home is a six-story, 320-bed state-of-the-art care facility located in Ajax, Ontario, serving the entire Durham Region. Designed with health and wellness of residents at the forefront, the home is equipped with a sustainable green roof, courtyards and energy efficient systems.

Infrastructure Ontario’s Accelerated Build model and the tools provided were essential to delivering this project on time. The model included asset optimization, rapid procurement and accelerated construction techniques. 

The secret to executing a fast-paced project is a successful preconstruction phase. To ensure important construction milestones would be met, the project team worked to develop a feasible strategy, receive stakeholder and community buy-in and advance the building design before construction even began.

In a project of this calibre, every second of productivity counts. Integrating lean construction principles and technology into the overall strategy allowed for a speedy project delivery without compromising the quality of the build – a true differentiator for PCL.

The team embraced modular construction to deliver the project – centered on a modular kit-of-parts approach - as the most effective method to meet the timeline. After identifying which key building features would be prefabricated, a modular kit of parts technique breaks each module into tangible components that a specialized trade partner would build at a separate location and ship to the site to be installed. Understanding the design requirements and relaying it to the trade partners early in the preconstruction process allowed PCL to manage offsite fabrication parallel to onsite construction. From precast concrete to washroom pods, each element was installed into the building like a fitted glove, avoiding delays in the schedule.

Fast tracking years’ worth of construction into a short period of time was first seen as ambitious. A testament to the level of planning and collaboration between our client, consultants and trade partners, Lakeridge Health’s new long-term care home achieved substantial performance on March 2, 2022 as Ontario’s first Accelerated Build Project.