The price and the scope of a project to upgrade elevators at Royal Inland Hospital, is going up.

Interior Health facilities director Lorne Sisley says six elevators built in the 1960s will be upgraded in multiple phases.

He says the cost won’t be known until a contract is awarded, but says it will be in the millions.

“We have worked through consultants to try to put together a tender package to be ready to go back out to the street with a bigger project, and hopefully get all six of the elevators working together better than they are right now,” Sisley says.

“The scope of the project is to replace a lot of the guts of the elevator, the mechanisms that are, in some cases, quite old. We always maintain them, because they are required to be maintained to a certain standard, but at a certain point you just need to do replacements. So trying to get them up a more modern standard, like you would see in a hospital that’s being built today.”

IH had planned last year to only replace two elevators for a cost of $850,000, and Sisley says plans changed when the cost jumped to upgrade only two, and the health authority has decided to go ahead with upgrading all six.

Sisley also says apart from the massive patient care tower project, the upgrades to the elevators are the next-largest project happening at the hospital property in Kamloops.