DID YOU KNOW?
Buried in the walls and floors of The Ottawa Hospital’s Civic and General campuses is a special courier system — thousands of metres of pneumatic tubes delivering specimens, prescriptions, and more. In fact, the General Campus has the largest pneumatic tube system in Canada, running some 7.68 kilometres! The system has been around since 1980, though a new, larger system was installed at the Civic a few years ago, which proved to be a challenge, given some of the buildings are a century old.
The system uses a vacuum and pressure to move thousands of items across each hospital campus, giving staff more time to do their work without having to hand-deliver these items. The Civic’s system is unique in that it can automatically unload a specimen at a drop zone in the laboratory.
The General Campus has 81 entry-and-receiving stations, making it the largest in Canada, while the Civic has 60 stations.
