The reason the Brunswick Medical Centre in Pointe-Claire is undergoing a major expansion is simple.

“We ran out of space,” Brunswick Medical Centre CEO Vince Trevisonno said with a laugh. “The family medicine and specialist clinics are bursting at the seams. Pediatric care is across the street, the endoscopy clinic is at 1 Holiday Ave. and archives and administration are housed somewhere else. In all, there are about 15,000 square feet of our services housed elsewhere.”

The medical centre will grow from its current 50,000 sq. ft. to 120,000 sq. ft. When completed, it will be one of the biggest medical centres in Quebec. The estimated date of completion for the $20 million expansion is the end of summer, 2018.

The family-medicine clinic at the Brunswick is a Groupe de médecine de famille — a super clinic — with 40 general practitioners on its roster. The specialist clinic has 60 doctors.

The expansion will allow both the specialist and family medicine clinics to double in size.

A private clinic called Sanomed Solutions is also housed in the medical building. It offers medical services, for a fee, to corporate and individual clients. Trevisonno said all other medical clinics at Brunswick operate within the public domain.

“We offer the public all the services,” he said. “Dentistry, psychiatry, physiotherapy, radiology, even an overnight sleep apnea clinic. And we’re in talks to bring in CT and MRI equipment.”

The Brunswick Medical Centre currently sees around 5,000 patients a week.

“I don’t think the number of patients will go up that drastically,” Trevisonno said. “The expansion is about gathering all the services together under one roof and giving more room to family practice and the specialists.”

The new build will include a psychiatric clinic, which will run separately from the centre’s mental-wellness clinic, and a neurology clinic will be introduced. The existing pharmacy will be enlarged, a LOBE clinic for hearing tests has signed on and there will be a Starbucks.

The entrance in the existing building will be renovated to accommodate the new main door and larger lobby, which will connect the two buildings. The strip mall once connected to the medical building is already being demolished to make room for the new four-storey structure, which will include underground parking.

The existing medical building is staying open during the expansion and efforts are being made to insure above-ground parking spaces remain available during construction. Trevisonno said the 220 professionals, support staff and nurses who work at the centre have been allocated off-site parking to free up the existing parking spaces for patients.

“We will monitor the situation closely and make more adjustments if necessary,” he said.

The medical centre is owned by seven partners including Trevisonno, another non-medical investor and six doctors who work at the medical centre. Their goal is to one day expand the centre’s onsite medical capabilities to include minor medical procedures such as colonoscopies.

This will be the third growing spurt for the Brunswick. The original Brunswick Medical Centre occupied 10,000 sq. ft. in Place Frontenac on Revcon Ave. It moved to the current location in 2010 and the 50,000 sq. ft. underwent a renovation of the interiors that same year.

“The doctors have a hub here,” Trevisonno said. “They can refer a patient to another doctor in the same building or send the patient for blood tests, in the same building. And we handle everything else for the doctors, from booking appointments to billing.”

Trevisonno said the expansion is being paid for with a mix of outside financing and financing from the partners.

“We all believe in short-term pain for long-term gain,” he said. “Medical equipment can be very expensive.”