A project management team has been assembled to oversee Stage 2 of planning for the region's new acute care hospital.
Heading up that team will be Paul Landry who has been selected as project director.
Landry is a senior management leader with plenty of experience in strategic planning for new hospitals in major cities like Montreal and Vancouver.
He says, if all goes to plan, construction on the new Windsor-Essex hospital should begin in 2026.
"Looking at each of these phases and being, I think, conservative, being reasonable, but still a bit aggressive, the project timeline would see us getting the shovel in the ground in approximately four and a half years."
Landry says they're looking to bring a developer on board sooner than later.
"Onboarding a developer much earlier on with us to help work with our design team so that they can start planning the construction well in advance, that's a recipe for accelerating things."
He says his team is looking for ways to expedite the process as well.
"We all know, in a very large project like this, time is money. In fact, time is big money, and the sooner that we can get it into construction and underway then the better off we will be from a total cost perspective."
Stage 2 planning for the new hospital is expected to take 14 to 15 months.
Landry says the goal is to submit a functional plan and a block schematic design to the Ministry of Health by the spring of 2023.