CAMBRIDGE — Odds are good you’ll get a private room when you’re admitted to the revamped Cambridge Memorial Hospital — but first the province must OK the $100 million project.

The expansion has been reworked — again — to match up with recent service changes and bed closures imposed by a provincial supervisor to erase a $5.6 million budget deficit.

The hospital board heard an update Wednesday on the long-talked-about overhaul of the Coronation Boulevard landmark. A 98-bed expansion was first suggested in 1999, but management turmoil and changes in provincial governments kept delaying the project.

Now, a 77-bed expansion is on track for provincial approval by summer, the board heard. The goal is to get the project added to the Liberal government’s next five-year capital spending plan expected to be announced this year.

“I would like this actually built before I actually need it,” said board member Don Pavey.

Project manager Angelo Presta offered no promises as to when provincial approval might come, but said talks are going well with provincial officials to rework a $120 million plan approved in 2007.

Once staff and the doctors using the hospital get a chance to review the most recent sketches, Presta expects to present them to the health ministry for approval by the end of March. Provincial officials promised to review them within two months, he said

In 2007, the health ministry gave the go-ahead for a two-phase revamp with a cost of $120 million. Only the first, $39 million phase was to start immediately, with construction costs covered by local fundraising and the rest of the job funded by the province some time future.

Now, there’s a “50-50 chance” the province will consider an all-at-once plan — potentially saving 20 per cent in total costs, Presta said.

And there’s also a chance such a big project would be put up for a designed, built and financed by a developer, with the province paying off the project over 30 years.

All that’s been spent on reconstruction so far is $2.5 million for site preparation in 2008 and 2009, including new water and electrical services and a rerouted main driveway. Presta said none of that money will be wasted after construction plans changed.

Since 2007, hospital construction rules have changed and Cambridge has trimmed some services to balance its books.

After the most recent “hospital improvement plan” Cambridge Memorial will have 120 beds, down from 155 last summer. If the hospital expansion unfolds as expected, the number would jump to 197 by 2015 — with long-range plans to add another 30 beds soon after.

Eliminating 85 job positions at the same time as planning to expand “seems like a great waste of resources and severance costs,” Pavey said.

The short-range staffing plan actually fits well into long-term growth, said acting hospital president Patrick Gaskin. Without a balanced budget now, the province won’t give money for expansion, he said.

The new Cambridge Memorial concept looks externally similar to the 2007 version, with a new, four-floor building constructed perpendicular to Coronation Boulevard, in what’s now the emergency department parking lot. The original A-block, stays, along with B-block added in the 1970s, and the Bailey Wellness centre from the 1980s.

Changes were also driven by new hospital construction standards to control infection and give handicapped accessibility to all areas, Presta said. That means 80 per cent of the new rooms will have only single bed and an individual washroom. That also means a new single room takes up as much space as a double room does today, Presta said.

In the existing hospital — parts of which are 60 years old — 30 per cent of rooms are singles. Half are doubles and the rest four-bed wards with single washrooms.

The new plan also moved a new 25-bed secure mental health about of the new building, into new, two-storey building overlooking the Grand River the segregates patients from the general public.

There’s also a 200-spot parking garage penciled in along the boundary with the Galt Country Club. If built, it would bring the total number of hospital parking spots to 1,000.

kswayze@cambridgereporter.com