Medical & Dental Clinic Fit-Outs

What makes a clinic different

A retail unit has one washroom and a sink. A clinic has water and drainage at every operatory or treatment room, and that is a fundamentally different plumbing problem — particularly on a slab, where every drain means core drilling and every core drill means a structural review.

Get the layout wrong relative to the existing services and you are not moving a wall, you are moving a drain.

The questions that decide the layout

• How many treatment rooms, and where can they physically go? Drainage locations often decide the plan before aesthetics get a say.
• Is there imaging? Radiography brings shielding requirements and a separate provincial approval process that runs on its own schedule.
• Where does the plant go? Dental practices need a compressor and suction plant, and it needs a room — ventilated, acoustically separated from treatment areas, and not where you wanted storage.
• Sterilisation flow. A sterilisation area has a required direction of travel from dirty to clean. It is a layout constraint, not a fitting.
• Accessibility. Doors, corridors, washrooms and at least one accessible treatment space, designed in rather than added at the end.

The approvals running alongside the permit

The building permit is not the only clock. Depending on the service and the municipality, plans may need health authority review — Fraser Health or Vancouver Coastal Health — before the building permit will be issued, and professional college requirements may apply to the premises themselves.

These are parallel processes with their own queues. Starting them late is one of the most common reasons a clinic opens a month after the construction finished.

A note on Surrey specifically

Surrey runs a dedicated Medical Clinic tenant improvement stream with a faster published target than a standard fit-out. It is narrow: physician-led services such as family practice, primary care and urgent care. It excludes massage, physiotherapy, chiropractic, acupuncture and counselling, which go through the standard stream. Details on our Surrey page.

The lease question nobody asks early enough

Does the base building have the electrical and mechanical capacity for what you are installing, and does the landlord permit the plumbing work your plan requires? A clinic in a unit that cannot take the drainage is a very expensive discovery to make after signing.

Every municipality runs this differently and the details change. The way to find out what your project actually involves for a project like this is to look at the unit before you commit to it: occupant load, exiting, washroom count, ceiling height, and what the existing mechanical and electrical will support.

We do that as a unit feasibility check, and act as the owner's agent on the permit application afterwards, so the city communication and the drawings sit in one place. A registered architect reviews the design for compliance with the building code and the local bylaw, and provides sign and seal where the project requires it.