Eighty per cent of patients in Oakville Memorial's COVID-19 care unit are from other regions

 

Local hospitals have been providing a helping hand in a big way to other overwhelmed regions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Halton Healthcare, which operates Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital (OTMH), Milton District Hospital and Georgetown Hospital, has been accepting patients in urgent need of medial care from hospitals overwhelmed by a rush of coronavirus patients.

Halton has been among the busiest health networks in the province as part of the Incident Management System (IMS), which monitors hospital capacity rates and shifts patients as required.

Some 80 per cent of the patients being taken care of in Oakville Trafalgar’s COVID-19 unit are from other regions.
Oakville Mayor Rob Burton said he was proud of the work the dedicated Halton Healthcare team has done and pointed to how over the last 10 weeks they have taken in 190 patients, the most of any Ontario health network in the system.

To also help deal with the load on the system, OTMH built an internal field hospital last April. While it’s not used to care for COVID-19 patients, it has created capacity for up to 40 more short-stay patients.

“Thanks to these additions and the diligence of our residents, our healthcare system today is solidly in the green category with an 85 per cent acute care bed occupancy rate and 75 per cent ICU bed occupancy rate,” Burton said in his newsletter.

Burton also pointed to Oakville being down in active cases.

“These are all trends in the right direction for our community, but everyone’s diligence is still required,” he added.