Vancouver businessman Jim Pattison has donated a record $75 million toward the St. Paul’s Hospital Foundation, money that will go towards the creation of the Jim Pattison Medical Centre.
It is being described as the largest donation in Canadian history by a private citizen to a single medical facility.
“I am proud to donate to St. Paul’s Foundation for hospital that has been putting people first in our community for more than 120 years,” the 88-year-old Pattison said in a release. “The new Jim Pattison Medical Centre will build on St. Paul’s Hospital’s history of serving British Columbians with excellence and compassion, and enable close collaboration among clinicians and researchers to collectively drive new standards in health care and treatment for all British Columbians.”
Pattison is chairman and CEO of the Jim Pattison Group, Canada’s second-largest private company with $9.6 billion in annual sales. It holds assets in broadcast media, automotive, advertising, agricultural equipment, food and beverage, entertainment, exporting, financial, and real estate.
His personal net worth, according to Forbes Magazine, is pegged at $4.5 billion.
In 1999, Pattison gave $20 million to Vancouver General Hospital for a prostate research centre, and in 2011 a $5-million donation to Surrey Memorial Hospital for an outpatient care and surgery centre.
According to a release from the St. Paul’s Foundation, the medical centre will be a purpose-built, fully integrated health campus comprising the entire 18.4-acre site (roughly the size of 15 football fields) on Station Street in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats.
The Jim Pattison Medical Centre will be the home of the new St. Paul’s Hospital with its associated acute-and-critical-care programs; the provincial Heart Centre, Centre for Heart Lung Innovation, the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and other centres of excellence in health care and research; primary care and specialized outpatient clinics; the PHC Research Institute; research facilities; and life sciences industry partners.
“A gift of this magnitude will have an impact today, and for generations to come,” said Dr. Jeff Pike, Physician and Director of Clinical Planning for Providence Health Care’s Redevelopment Project. “Our patients’ care experience will be greatly improved, and they’ll be supported from hospital to community to home –receiving the right care, at the right time, at the right place.”
The new hospital — estimated to cost $1.2 billion — is not expected to be built for another seven years.
