It’s been more than two years since a temporary entrance to the emergency department at Guelph General Hospital was built in the front driveway, and it’s not likely to come down anytime soon.
The structure’s fate is tied to expansion plans and will remain in place until that work is completed, explained Marianne Walker, the hospital’s president and CEO.
“It’s really served us well as we wait for redevelopment of our emergency department,” she said. “If we didn’t have that trailer, we wouldn’t have been able to manage and we wouldn’t be able to manage today without it.”
Walker noted the expansion concept has been approved by the Ministry of Health, but the specific finances around it and detailed design have not.
As it stands now, the plan is to increase the ambulance garage to accommodate three vehicles, up from the current two, as well double the number of beds for people experiencing mental health and/or addiction crisis, to eight from four.
Those beds will also be moved to another area of the hospital, Walker noted.
“That will allow us to expand our emergency space,” she said, adding that will allow for the number of see-and-treat spaces to be increased from five to 13. “That will also allow us to have better space for isolation and infection control/prevention practices.”
The temporary emergency department entrance was installed in late 2020, in large part driven by increased demand due to the pandemic. It’s used for registration and triage services, as well as being the main waiting room for care.
“We knew it was too small even before the pandemic,” Walker said of the emergency department. “When the pandemic hit, our clinical team came together and said ‘We need to do something now.’”
When the department first opened in 2001/2002, it was sized based on a projected volume of 45,000 annual visits but it hit 63,000 prior to the arrival of COVID.
Last year there were 59,172 visits.
“We’re going to need that space while we redevelop,” Walker said of the temporary structure. “We believe it’s going to be still several years that we have that because there’s a lot of work that has to be done and we have to continue to keep our emergency department open.”
Walker hopes to begin the expansion work “very soon” but notes that depends on ministry approval.
“We still have to go through several phases with the capital branch of the ministry,” she said. “The ministry has standards that you must follow.”
