More hospital beds lined up for flu season

Up to 25 additional hospital beds will be made available in hospitals throughout the Erie St. Clair Local Health Integration Network to deal with any pressures experienced during flu season.

The LHIN board has approved a one-time allocation of $1 million towards the project. The new beds are in addition to the 30 surge beds for Windsor Regional Hospital and Bluewater Health in Sarnia and 24 flex beds already funded by the province.

LHIN CEO Ralph Ganter said the funds will come from an urgent priority fund and he wanted to get the formal approval before the next board meeting in January.

“If over the holiday season we start to see some extraordinary pressures in our hospitals then we can apply some funding so that we can open up some additional beds,” he said.

The funding works out to $400 per day, which is the equivalent of 2,500 bed days of capacity.

Ganter said the individual hospitals across Windsor and Essex County, Chatham-Kent and Sarnia and Lambton County will receive the beds based on several indicators the LHIN will be monitoring. “For me, it’s overutilization of say medical surgical beds, perhaps cancellation of surgeries,” he said. “An indicator I’m interested in is the amount of emergency visits and how many people are actually prepped waiting in the emergency department for a bed.

“If we see say a pressure in Sarnia-Lambton or in Leamington, we can be nimble because we’ll start to see those trends take off very, very quickly.”

The LHIN will be able to see these types of statistics on a daily basis, said Ganter. Another indicator is influenza outbreaks in longterm care homes, he said.

Last year’s flu season was one the reasons this project moved forward, said Ganter, because some hospitals in the LHIN were over capacity.

“We wanted to make sure that we were really well-prepared from what we had experienced last year,” he said.

Ganter will report back to the board at its January meeting about how the funds are being allocated.

“Perhaps our hypotheses might be changing and we may want to reapply (funds) in a different way if it isn’t used most appropriately that way.”