The Erie St. Clair Local Health Integration Network now has some numbers behind its plan to deal with this year's flu season.
Up to $1-million will be made available to hospitals in the Chatham, Windsor, and Sarnia areas during the anticipated holiday flu surge to open extra beds. Last year, Windsor Regional Hospital was at over capacity for several weeks in December and January because of an influenza and respiratory outbreak in long-term care homes.
LHIN CEO Ralph Ganter says the additional funding will create an extra 25 hospital beds.
"It's about 2,500 patient days worth of care. It equates to about 25 beds when we open them in a couple of weeks around December 1," says Ganter.
The one time urgent priority funding can be used until March 31. The beds are over and above the 30 surge beds and 24 flex beds already provided by the province after last year's capacity pressures.
Ganter says the extra funding provides hospitals the flexibility to meet increased demand.
"Insert the capacity if it's needed during what we say is flu season but it's not necessarily the flu all the time. It might be respiratory illnesses in general. So, it's there to help us with capacity challenges that we may have," Ganter says.
He doesn't expect the funding to be needed beyond the March deadline and says the board of directors will get monthly updates.
"Because we have indicators, we can keep monitoring and watching this and we'll communicate to the ministry how it's going locally. There's a lot of monitoring taking place across the province in terms of beds, emergency department volumes, etc. So, we're really quite well tuned in this year," says Ganter.