The Bonnyville Health Centre celebrated its 25th anniversary on June 10, inviting the public to tour the facility and join staff and management for coffee, snacks, and reminiscing at a table covered in old photo albums.
Sister Mary Ellen O'Neill, the hospital's fundraising an events chair, conducted the tour and told guests about the meaning of the art on the wall, the stained glass in the chapel, as well as the facility's history. The tour wove through the different wards of the hospital, from emergency to the cancer ward, before visiting palliative care and then going upstairs to see the improvements and renovations still underway.
During the tour, O'Neill spoke of changes that have occurred as the facility grows more crowded, with ultrasounds moving upstairs and the building hosting clinics as well as traditional hospital functions.
The tour also stopped in the Auxilian Jubilee Garden, just off the palliative care wing, where the Bonnyville Health Centre Auxilians and the lottery board, with help from residents and Notre Dame High School students, erected a garden to commemorate the new millennium on June 23, 2000.
Chief of staff Dr. Guy Lamoureux spoke at the commemoration ceremony, and O'Neill was so moved by his words that she handed out copies to visitors in the garden.
"It is so incredibly appropriate that a garden be attached to a hospital," he wrote, "since gardens in so many ways reflect our own birth, life, and death."
The garden, as well as a few quiet rooms, are located throughout for families and patients of palliative care.
MLA for Bonnyville - Cold Lake Genia Leskiw arrived at the end of the tour with a plaque to present to O'Neill and Alex Smyl, the hospital's executive director.
Afterwards, Leskiw said, "The hospital is the lifeline of a community. It represents the best of a person's health and it represents the security blanket of knowing that when you need help, it's there for you. We are very blessed as a community to have this facility."
She added that when she first arrived in the community, 36 years ago, she used to go to the old Duclos Hospital.
"When you see the growth in the medical facility we have here, it's just absolutely outstanding.
"The warmth that you see around here, that's exactly the warmth that you feel when you enter this facility. It's fabulous."
