Ottawa Hospital building 40-bed unit in Civic Campus parking lot to help increase capacity

The Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus is building a 40-bed temporary unit in the parking lot. (Mike Mersereau/CTV News Ottawa)

OTTAWA — The Ottawa Hospital is building a 40-bed temporary unit in the parking lot at the Civic Campus to help deal with overcrowding at the hospital.

An email to Ottawa Hospital staff obtained by CTV News Ottawa says, "As many of you know, the Ottawa Hospital has been experiencing increasing occupancy rates."

"To address this, we have been working with the Ministry of Health to organize an Emergency Department Ambulance Offload and Medicine Transition Unit facility at the Civic Campus."

The new 40-bed temporary unit will be located in the east parking lot of the Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus, between the main campus and the Grimes Lodge.

"It will increase hospital capacity and allow for more efficient patient flow throughout the hospital," said the memo.

CTV News Ottawa reached out to the Ottawa Hospital on Friday for details.

According to the Ottawa Public Health COVID-19 dashboard, the health care system capacity for acute care beds was at 101 per cent occupancy as of Oct. 21.

News of the new 40-bed temporary unit at the Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus comes just over a week after hospital executives outlined steps to address ambulance offload wait times for Ottawa Paramedics in emergency departments.

The Community and Protective Services Committee was told the Civic Campus is setting up an "ambulance intake with zero offload pilot."

Dr. Andrew Falconer of the Queensway Carleton Hospital told the committee that the ambulance intake with zero offload pilot program would allow ambulances to "simply offload directly to the nurse in a new space."