Verdun Hospital gets temporary extension to alleviate bed shortage
The Verdun Hospital is building a temporary extension that will house 36 individual patient rooms and a hematology/oncology clinic.
The hospital will be short of beds this fall because a temporary 34bed annex, built during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in April, must be taken down. The annex is not suitable for winter.
A new two-storey modular structure will be built in a municipal parking lot beside the hospital, said Sonia Bélanger, head of the CIUSSS du Centre-sud-de-l’îlede-montréal. It should be ready in early 2021 and will cost about $32 million.
The single-occupancy rooms will house patients on the second floor and the oncology clinic will be on the ground floor.
The hospital needs the extra space because a planned extension probably won’t be completed before 2024.
At present, there are no COVID -19 patients at the Verdun Hospital. In the event of a second wave, patients suffering from the novel coronavirus will be treated on the hospital’s fifth floor or at Notre-dame Hospital.
More people in their 30s and 40s are coming to the hospital’s emergency room with flu-like symptoms and testing positive for the virus, said physician Jeanfrançois Thibert. Others are experiencing a loss of taste and smell.
“They’re people in bars or attending parties with no social distancing,” he said. “Most of them will have minor symptoms, but maybe someone in their family will have a more severe episode and could end up in intensive care. It’s very contagious and they’re responsible for not giving the disease to anyone else who could die from it.”
The extra beds will help reduce the occupancy rate of emergency stretchers and will help the hospital cope with a potential second wave of COVID-19, Health Minister Christian Dubé said in a news release.
“One of our top priorities is to reduce emergency room wait times, and the delivery of this modular building to the Verdun Hospital will help make progress in this direction,” he said.