When flu season reaches its peak, officials at Windsor Regional Hospital will be well-prepared.
The hospital has received $1.6 million from the Erie-St. Clair LHIN to open surge beds in order to better accommodate the higher number of patients during the upcoming flu season.
Karen McCullough, chief operating officer and chief nursing executive, explained that the increase of people coming to the hospital with the flu can create congestion in the emergency department.
"Typically what happens is hospitals don't have enough beds to accommodate for that. When we don't have enough inpatient beds we know what happens, [emergency departments] are busier, ambulances have trouble offloading and it's just not in the best interest of anyone," she said.
The additional funding will allow the hospital to open a total of 20 extra beds. The advanced funding that the hospital received will go mainly towards staffing, with the average cost of an acute care bed coming in at $1,200 per day. According to McCullough, the surge beds will only be open as need be.
"If we have an increase of patients coming in through the emergency department and all of our regular usual beds are occupied, we will have 10 beds at the Met Campus and 10 beds at the Ouellette Campus that we can open as needed to take those patients out of the emergency department, get them assessed, get them settled," said McCullough.
This is the second year in a row that Windsor Regional received $1.6 million in surge funding for the flu season. McCullough said the extra beds made a big difference during the last season and created a more streamlined approach to patient care.
"When we have those beds, which we did last year, I'm not saying we had no trouble but we had very little bottleneck in our emergency as a result of surge," she explained.
McCullough said that the flu season typically lasts from November until March.
