Guelph General Hospital is hoping to have good news to share after the provincial budget included funding for additional beds in Ontario hospitals.
The provincial budget did not include specifics on which hospitals would receive funding for those new beds, but Guelph General Hospital has made an application to the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care for 24 additional beds, said hospital CEO Marianne Walker.
The 24 beds will be added to the hospital's existing 159 medical surgical beds, which does not include nursery, pediatric or ICU, for an approximate 15 per cent increase in capacity.
In an interview earlier this week, Walker told GuelphToday even before the funding is announced, the hospital is moving ahead with the work needed to support those beds, over a dozen of which have already been put into operation.
That work includes hiring staff and the Foundation of Guelph General Hospital is securing the equipment that will be needed as they are added.
“We are opening the beds because we need them,” said Walker.
The hospital is using some spaces in the building which may have once been used as patient care areas but over the years were converted to office space or storage.
Walker said GGH is often at 98 per cent or higher occupancy, mostly due to the population growth in the community.
Even though there is not currently a high number of COVID-19 cases being treated at the hospital, Walker is dispelling the myth that the hallways are currently empty of patients.
“We’re not empty,” said Walker. “The time we were empty was early on in the first few months when we weren't doing surgeries, no procedures were being done.”
Walker said the hospital has been feeling the pressure of that population growth for some time and it isn’t expected to get any better.
“It’s about managing the growth of our community because our occupancy is high, at times we have patients waiting in our emerg for a bed,” said Walker.
Although WDG Public Health lists only one active COVID-19 case in hospital at the moment, Walker expects that number to grow as the province is experiencing a new surge in cases.
“We have to make sure we have enough capacity to care for medical patients or patients who have COVID, at the same time balancing to make sure we can continue with our surgical cases,” said Walker. “For the pandemic we know the numbers are going up in Guelph.”
She notes that flu season will also likely add to the logjam.
Walker said the hospital no longer uses hallway beds, except in rare cases when a patient is ready to be discharged and the infection control and prevention team has ensured they are clear to be in the hall.
One challenge as the number of COVID cases increases is the backlog of surgeries left over from the spring when elective surgeries were cancelled.
“When the directive came down to cancel the elective surgeries, we were still doing all of the critical surgeries, like the cancer surgeries and others that needed to be done. Those continued, Now we are catching up,” said Walker.
Ministry funding has not yet been announced but work is already underway to equip and staff the new beds.
“Our foundation has also been supportive, helping us to get the equipment in and we are ready to open those beds. We are almost at the point of having all of the staff we need for those beds," said Walker.
A temporary structure being built outside the emergency department is not related to the increase in number of beds, said Walker.
The 2,300 square-foot structure, which consists of three pre-fabricated trailers, is instead going to be used temporarily by the ED while parts of it are being renovated inside the hospital.
The temporary structure will help in a number of ways, said Michelle Bott, senior director of Patient Care Services at GGH.
The emergency department was originally built to service 45,000 visits per year, but is currently trending at closer to 64,000 visits.
“The emergency department is undersized for the number of patients we are seeing. This will allow us to move the triage, registration and main waiting room into the new structure,” said Bott.
“Once we move the triage, registration and waiting room out we will then be doing some renovations on that area, moving our ‘see and treat’ into that area and creating additional patient bays in the main part of the department.”
The ED is also adding a larger trauma resuscitation room as part of the renovation.
In total, capacity in the ED will be increased by about 25 per cent, said Bott.
“It’s going to help us address that longer-standing space problem that we had in the emergency department even prior to COVID,” she said.
The renovation will be done in a few phases, said Bott, with an expected completion date of late January.
