It also hoped to recover that cost through legal action, board corporate service executive director Nigel Trainor told Parliament’s health select committee during the board’s annual review hearing.
The SDHB had cited commercial sensitivity when it declined to answer Otago Daily Times questions about the cost of fixing the issue, which has dogged the $14.8 million critical care services upgrade.
"Short term we will be paying those bills. We will be taking legal action. That is in train," he said.
The problems delayed the opening of stage one of the ICU upgrade, and have prevented the opening of the 10-bed second stage, to have opened in mid-2019, although the board has consent to use the space in an emergency.
A modern intensive care unit is expected to be able to exchange its air 14 times an hour, a requirement the present ventilation system cannot sustain.
Mr Trainor said numerous engineering consultants had examined the ventilation system to try to find some way to make it meet requirements.
"I would suggest that right from the word go when the decision was made to utilise the current plant rather than give it its own stand-alone plant, that was the start of the issues.
"It is quite obvious that the consultant did not understand the whole system and that has also plugged into the issues, so it has taken a long time to complete a rectification design, partly because every time a design was made there was another reason why it may or may not have worked."
The system was built in 1981, and Mr Trainor said it had some "unique" aspects to it which he believed the consultant used for the ICU build had not understood.
SDHB chief executive Chris Fleming decried the poor state of the building in which the intensive care unit and several other vital hospital services are housed.
"It is a poster child for why building a new Dunedin Hospital was the right thing to do, rather than trying to modernise the existing one," he said.
The expenditure will be another factor in the SDHB exceeding its budgeted deficit of $24 million.
Mr Trainor said the organisation was tracking towards a $32million overall deficit at year’s end, mainly due to four factors — a miscalculation of its Pharmac funding forecast, increased expenditure on air ambulance services and blood products, and licensing of computer software.
Dunedin National list MP Michael Woodhouse noted the SDHB had only hit its financial target once in the past 22 financial years.
"While there are a number of controllable factors, I think you get quite a bit of pressure to create a business plan and to meet an arbitrary target which is the healthcare equivalent of a fish trying to ride a bicycle."
