Thank you very much for inviting us this morning.
I'm here as operational director for John Laing projects in B.C.. I will give you the operational overview, which is the less sexy part, probably being the 30-year part of the—it's where the rubber hits the road, so to speak. I will give you a brief overview of our B.C. projects and give you some of my observations on advantages of PPPs. I was advised that this is actually day four for you, so I'm sure you've heard it all before. You've probably even heard about projects that I'm going to talk about. Please stop me if it becomes overly repetitive.
The first project that we have is Abbotsford Regional Hospital and Cancer Centre, which is the first LEED gold hospital in Canada, LEED being leadership in energy and environmental design. We were contracted to provide LEED silver, but were only a few points away from LEED gold and partnered with the hospital and the local council in order to achieve LEED gold, which we're very happy about.
Abbotsford is an acute care hospital with a full cancer centre. It has 300 beds and is 70,000 square metres. It has nine operating rooms, a maternal-newborn facility with 28 beds, and a unit for 40 mental health patients. It's the first PPP in British Columbia, and I believe at this stage it's the only PPP in British Columbia, with fully integrated facilities management services. When I say fully integrated, that includes plant services and life cycle, obviously, which most PPPs include, but also soft services, which are housekeeping, linen laundry, food services, and portering.
The green features of the building include low-flush toilets, a motion-sensing light system, and 28 electrical car plug-ins. Unfortunately, we have no electrical cars in Abbotsford at the moment, although they are available in British Columbia. We have a stormwater retention pump on the lowest point of the site that we utilize for irrigation of plant life on-site.
The next asset that I'm going to talk about is the Gordon and Leslie Diamond Health Care Centre, which is in the heart of hospital land in Vancouver. It's adjacent to the Vancouver General Hospital. It is 32,000 square metres at a capital cost of $95 million. It is a combination of health authority clinics, UBC space, and private clinics. The University of British Columbia medical school has its medical lecture theatre on the ground floor. This has been operational since August 2006.
The next project I'm going to talk about is the Kelowna and Vernon hospitals project, which I believe you may know about. It has a $432-million capital cost, with 53,000 square metres. Kelowna and Vernon hospitals obviously are not in the same city; they're 45 kilometres apart. There are two sites, three buildings. The project was the Kelowna project, operational in May of this year. It was completed six months ahead of schedule.
That's a summary of our projects. I want to give you some of my views and experience of some of the advantages of PPP projects. The process from RFP to operation is far quicker than a traditional procurement approach. For example, the RFP for the Abbotsford Regional Hospital and Cancer Centre came out in 2003 and we were treating the first patients in that facility in August 2008.
In the Kelowna-Vernon project, the RFP came out in 2007 and we were treating patients in Vernon in September 2011 and in Kelowna in May 2012. I think you'll agree that's pretty impressive for such significant assets.
The public sector deals with a single point of contact. These projects are an integrated fora because the operator, designer, builder, mechanical and electrical are all under one roof. This extends also to users. At Abbotsford, there were more than 140 connections involved with the design meetings for that project. The private sector bring best-in-class providers, contractors, service providers, which allows the public sector to do what it does best. Because of the life-cycle approach, the public sector gets a new asset at the end of the concession period. It's a more aesthetically pleasing end product and indeed a product that has a more highly desired effect on the end user. I'll give you a brief example of this.
I was talking to a radiation oncologist only yesterday who was telling me the positive effect of the bright and spacious facility on both patients and staff, because most of our patient rooms have great views of the mountains in the Fraser Valley. But the overwhelming message that I got was that because his staff was so happy at work, the impact on the patients was so positive. I thought that was a really compelling endorsement.
Something we probably haven't touched on this morning is that key to the success of a public-private partnership is indeed that word “partnership”. It takes away the concept of vendor versus partner.
I often credit Larry Blain from Partnerships BC for the comment he made which really does sums it up: the mark of a success of a PPP project is the quality of the relationship between the public and private partners. In all of the three projects that I've described, the partnership is of the highest quality, and I really believe that is the overwhelming message I'd like to deliver.