Field hospital set to open at Sunnybrook; GTA hospitals transferring hundreds of patients

A new field hospital in Toronto is getting ready to start accepting transferred patients this week.

As the mobile unit at Sunnybrook Hospital prepares to open, hundreds of patients in just the past two weeks have reportedly been transferred from hot spot hospitals to other parts of the province to free up desperately needed beds.

GTA hospitals now overflowing with COVID patients have transferred over 550 patients to other areas of the province.

Sunnybrook is opening  beds this week with a total of 20 beds being available by the end of the month. The beds will be used for COVID-19 patients who are recovering or have recovered and are awaiting to go home or to be transitioned to an alternative care setting.

Each tent set up at Sunnybrook contains eight to ten beds ready to handle patients. In total, the field hospital will be able to handle up to 100 patients.

The mobile unit has been set up in a parking lot at the site and is one of two in the province designed to help address growing capacity challenges.

The province says the temporary beds will provide increased capacity to the health system as a whole by freeing up acute and critical care capacity within hospitals. It will also help expand capacity by allowing the hospitals to transfer non-critical care patients to these general medicine beds.

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The Toronto Western Hospital and Toronto General Hospital, both part of the University Health Network (UHN), also set up large tents last week to serve as additional patient waiting areas to help reduce crowding in their emergency departments.

The number of patients flooding into GTA hospitals continues to grow with staff and resources being shuffled and patients being moved to deal with the demand.

Doctors say they are not only seeing more patients during the third wave, but many are showing up with much more severe symptoms of the virus.

According to the latest provincial numbers, there are now 2,202 people hospitalized in the province due to COVID-19 with 755 in the ICU. Both numbers are records since the start of the pandemic.