About BuildMedi and its editorial standards
BuildMedi is The Alberta Medical Building Guide: a source-first reference for owners planning, permitting, designing, renovating, building, and opening medical facilities in Alberta. This page explains who publishes it, how its guides are made, and how to request a correction.
What BuildMedi is
BuildMedi helps physicians, clinic owners, developers, investors, and project teams understand the decisions, approvals, systems, risks, and professional services involved in delivering an Alberta medical facility. The initial focus is Alberta, beginning with Edmonton, with particular depth on non-hospital surgical facilities.
The site is written for an owner making real decisions, and reviewed as if a regulator might read it. Core answers, checklists, and sources stay publicly accessible; nothing essential sits behind a form.
How pages are made
Every regulatory or technical guide follows the same method:
- Research against primary sources. Claims are drawn from legislation, adopted codes, regulators, municipalities, and standards bodies. Each claim records the exact source, the section or clause where possible, the edition, and the date it was checked.
- A maintained source registry. Citations resolve to a central registry that tracks each authority's edition and last-verified date. When a code edition changes, every page citing it is found and updated; the change is noted in that page's update log.
- Adversarial review before publication. Drafts are checked for contradictions, wrong-authority errors, jurisdiction mixups, and facility-type overgeneralization before anyone sees them.
- Honest review status. A page reviewed by a named professional shows that reviewer, their regulating body, and the review date. A page that has not yet had professional review says "Information last verified on" a date instead. BuildMedi never implies a review that did not happen.
- Dated maintenance. Codes, fees, processing times, and accreditation processes change. Pages carry a visible update log and a last-reviewed date, and are re-verified on a set cadence.
How authority is labelled
Alberta medical-building requirements come from five distinct layers, and BuildMedi tags every claim with its layer rather than writing "the rules say":
- Municipal: zoning, development permits, building and trade permits, business licensing. Edmonton and Calgary differ, and pages say so.
- Provincial safety codes: the National Building and Fire Codes (Alberta Editions), electrical, plumbing, and gas code adoptions, and STANDATA interpretations.
- Clinical accreditation: College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta requirements and related provincial designations.
- Specialized standards: CSA healthcare standards and government design requirements, which apply only through a mechanism such as a code reference, accreditation condition, or contract. Pages name the mechanism.
- Operational readiness: privacy, occupational health and safety, workers' compensation, equipment registration, and licensing steps before opening.
What BuildMedi is not
BuildMedi is general planning and construction information. It is not a substitute for an architect, engineer, code consultant, medical director, infection-control specialist, lawyer, or regulator, and it never predicts what a specific authority or assessor will approve. It is not an official publication of any government body or regulator, and it does not reproduce copyrighted standards or non-public accreditation materials. Where the correct requirement depends on facility type, procedures, anesthesia, equipment, or adopted editions, BuildMedi publishes the framework and the questions to ask, not a universal specification.
Independence and commercial disclosure
BuildMedi may earn revenue from qualified project referrals, sponsorships, or professional listings. The rules that govern this are fixed:
- Any material connection behind a recommendation is disclosed clearly and next to the recommendation itself, consistent with Competition Bureau guidance on deceptive marketing, which treats undisclosed commercial connections behind reviews and recommendations as misleading.[1]
- No provider is ranked or recommended without a documented methodology. Firms named as examples of publicly documented work are labelled as examples, not endorsements, and are corroborated through neutral records such as regulator directories, permit data, and government project databases rather than a firm's own marketing.
- Editorial content, expert review, sponsorship, and advertising are kept visibly distinct, consistent with the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards on testimonials and advertising that is identifiable as advertising.[2]
- Named experts and contributors appear only with their written approval, are credited only on pages they actually contributed to or reviewed, and are identified with their regulating body and registration where they hold a restricted title.
Corrections
If anything on BuildMedi is wrong, out of date, or missing an important condition, we want to know. Send the page address and the issue through the contact page. Verified corrections are fixed promptly, noted in the affected page's update log with the date and what changed, and re-checked against the underlying source. Where a correction affects other pages, all of them are updated together.
Scope of this page
Scope: This page describes BuildMedi's editorial method and commercial policies. It is not project guidance and covers no regulatory requirements itself.