The emergency room at Michael Garron Hospital is treating double its patient capacity
The hospital’s pediatric patients alone have increased by nearly 70 per cent over the last five years
The emergency room at Michael Garron Hospital is reportedly accommodating more than double its patient capacity.
A new story from CBC says the east end hospital treated 107,000 patients last year despite being designed to accommodate about 50,000 annually. Around 300 patients seek medical care in the emergency department each day.
“We’ve absorbed waiting room spaces. We’ve absorbed lounges. We’ve absorbed conference room spaces,” chief medical director Dr. Kyle Vojdani told CBC. “Most of these spaces were never designed for clinical care.”
Related: A new Covid variant has reached Ontario
Vojdani said the volume of pediatric patients has increased by nearly 70 per cent over the last five years, and the number of adults visiting the emergency room has increased by 35 per cent.
Offices in the building have been turned into pediatric treatment areas, and other measures such as artificial intelligence for bureaucratic tasks are being used to improve efficiency.
The Toronto East Health Network, which includes Michael Garron Hospital, has already been receiving increased provincial funding since 2018, a Ministry of Health spokesperson told CBC in a statement.
“This is in addition to the $44 million we have invested in hospitals to reduce emergency department wait times and $10 million to upskill 1,000 nurses to work in emergency departments,” the statement said.
Vojdani said it’s likely the hospital will provide care to 50,000 additional patients over the next five years due to population increase in the area.
Related: The Ford government just introduced new rules that will make it even harder to find a family doctor
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
