LHSC prepares to transfer patients to other hospitals as Omicron-fueled capacity crunch worsens

Stretched to its limit, the London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) plans to ask smaller hospitals in the region for relief.

“The hospitals are at the maximal stress right now,” explains LHSC’s Dr. Adam Dukelow. “Hopefully the maximum stress.”

LHSC operates both University Hospital and Victoria Hospital in London.

Currently caring for 161 COVID patients, 24 in critical care, LHSC will create space by transferring patients to other hospitals in order to preserve its ability to offer highly specialized cardiac and neuroscience care.

“In the next 24 hours some patients will move, likely less than 10, but enough to create space,” says Dr. Dukelow.

Either COVID patients, or patients admitted for other reasons, will be transferred based on what other hospitals are able to accept.

On Tuesday, the Middlesex-London Health Unit indicated that the Omicron wave appears to be plateauing.

Corresponding hospitalizations can peak more than a week after spread begins to wane in the community.

During previous waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals in St. Thomas, Strathroy, Stratford, and Hanover have been among those to accept patients from LHSC, but now they’re also stretched thin and facing uncertainty about the number of patients that will be admitted in the coming days.

“It’s a matter of who is stretched more,” admits Dr. Dukelow. “Some hospitals may have just one or two beds that they can help us out with, it’s a matter of maximizing capacity in the system.”

A temporary field hospital inside the Agriplex had 144 beds, but after sitting idle for a year and a half it was decommissioned in early December.

Dr. Dukelow explains that over the course of the pandemic other strategies, like transferring patients between hospitals, developed as better options to address a capacity crunch.

He believes the Agriplex site wouldn’t have been a solution to the current situation.

“We can actually stand up more beds within the walls of the London Health Sciences Centre that have all the equipment, like oxygen, of a standard hospital.”