Windsor Regional Hospital has received some provincial funding to help deal with the upcoming influx of patients due to the flu.
For the second year in a row, it has received $1.6-million to help pay for 20 extra beds, if needed.
From mid-November to March, the hospital tends to experience an increase in patients.
Chief Operating Officer Karen McCullough says the money helps to offset a busy season in the emergency department. "Mostly frail elderly people that get the flu come into hospital, they are elderly, they are sicker, they stay long. Typically what happens is hospitals don't have enough beds to accommodate for that so when we don't have enough inpatient beds, we know what happens, emergencies are busier."
McCullough adds the money is used, only if needed. "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 ten beds at the Met Campus and ten beds at the Ouellette Campus."
An acute care bed costs $1,200 a day to operate and McCullough says the extra money helps. "Those 20 beds make all the difference in the world, you can imagine what twenty beds does to an organization, when we have those beds which we did last year, I'm not saying we had no trouble but we had very, very little bottleneck."
The hospital received the same amount of additional funding in 2018.