The Huron-Perth Healthcare Alliance is working with its partners to end hallway medicine within the health alliance.
CEO Andrew Williams said they've re-directed what is referred to as "surge funding," which is funding that has been given to hospitals to deal with the expected increase in patients during the flu season.
“It's a way of making sure that the right patient is in the right location, which will be best for their care and it will free up capacity in our acute care beds for people who need our services in the hospital," said Williams. "We're using some of our surge funding to access non-funded beds in some long-term partners. So where we have patients in our hospitals who have been deemed ready to go to long-term care, can't go to long-term care because a bed's not available, we'll be talking to them to see if we can move them into these un-funded beds.”
Williams said if they had gone ahead and acquired more beds, they would also have had to bring in more staff to look after the patients in those beds. The result of that would likely have meant taking staff from other hospitals, and they didn't want to do that. Williams also said it prevents unnecessary competition between their organizations for staff.
Williams said no one else in the area is doing this so it will be watched closely. He said he expects the extra funding will continue until the end of March.