P.E.I. moving patients to long-term care facilities to open up hospital beds in face of COVID-19

Health PEIis transferring patients out of long-term care beds at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital to free up resources to combat COVID-19.

In a news briefing Tuesday, Marion Dowling, HealthPEI'schief of nursing, said long-term care beds at QEH are usually close to capacity. She said the agency wants to bringthe hospital closer to a 75 per cent occupancy rate.

"To use the available beds in long-term care, we are safely transferring people to long-term care facilities,or back to their long-term care facilities, as quickly as we can," Dowling said.

Dowling said not all of those patients will be discharged to nursing homes some will be discharged from the hospital and allowed to go back homeif it is safe to do so.

Jason Lee, CEO for P.E.I. Seniors Homes, a company that runs private long-term care facilities on the Island, said they are ready and willing to accommodate more residents.

He said he has been in contact with a government representative, butthe province hasn't directly asked for help yet.

"If the province wants us to explore what our maximum capacity is for a short period of time we can look at that," he said.

"I know that the province is looking at all of its options and the people that I've been working with are very interested in exploring all the options."

Lee said his homes are fairly close to capacity based ontheir current licences.

"We operate on a regular basis here with a fairly set number of residents and that works really well. Our systems are built around those numbers. And we know we can expand that number a little bit in situations like this and still getvery safe operations," he said.

"We always work with the provincial government. They would not ask us to take people into our homes beyond what we all know is the safe level."

Temporary licence

In order to accommodate more people, the facility's licences have would have to change to allow them to care for more people.

"This is something that has happened in the past and the province has basically issued what's been called a temporary licence extra capacity is opened up to to alleviate pressure maybe somewhere else in the system," he said.

And, while Lee said P.E.I. Seniors Homes' three facilities are close to capacity right now, as dictated by their licence, he does have enough staff to handle extra residents if need be.

"Our capacity among those three homes is 299 residents. And across those three homes, I could see us caring for approximately 10 additional residents in a, you know, a short-term temporary licence situation," he said.

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