Progress is being made to transform the St. Clair College SportsPlex in Windsor into a field hospital to handle patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Windsor Regional Hospital reached an agreement with the college on April 2 to use the space to handle a possible surge in patients.
Work has been underway since then to build walls to create up to 100 bed spaces in the facility at 2000 Talbot Rd.
Windsor Regional Hospital Vice President of Critical Care and Director of Infection Control, Karen Riddell, expects it to take ten days to complete work on the first 30 spaces.
Speaking on AM800's The Morning Drive, Riddell said they're going to be running simulations this week to make sure they have everything they need.
"As you can image there's a lot of work to be done, running electricity to each room, portable sinks, computers, faxes, printers," she says. "So it's a huge project and it's coming together very, very quickly."
St. Clair Sportsplex in Windsor, Ont., on Friday, April 3, 2020. (Rich Garton / CTV Windsor)
Riddell, says the Sportsplex could house a mix of non-isolated and isolated patients.
"We predict that we'll be having patients in their convalescent period of hospitalization, whatever the reason might be. Maybe they're not quite ready to go home yet or can't go home for whatever reason, so we can move them out of the hospital into a lower acuity setting," she says.
Riddell adds that right now they have very good patient capacity in the hospital but they want to plan for the worst, that way if they do need additional space, they're not scrambling at the last-minute.