A 50-per cent expansion of the emergency department at Southwestern Ontario’s largest children’s hospital is going a long way in combating the demand for service, staff say.
London Health Sciences Centre has expanded its pediatric emergency department at Children’s Hospital by adding eight new beds and two dedicated procedure rooms.
Staff say that since the expansion at the end of September went into effect, the hospital has seen more than 2,628 patients, helping to reduce wait times and ensure patients and their families are seen more quickly.
Director of pediatric emergency Dr. Rod Lim says they have been bursting at the seams, covering almost a third of the province.
“So we have a lot of specialized care that we provide a children’s hospital, and we’re the front door, so what this allows us to do is really place patients that arrive at our department into a care space a lot faster and allow treatments to occur in parallel,” Lim says.
He says that before the additional 10 spaces, they were in a situation where there were not enough care spaces to treat patients, pushing them into the waiting room.
“With this, we’re able to decompress them into care spaces faster, start treatment and really kind of get them the care they need in a more timely fashion.”
Lim said while patients could still face some wait times, the move was a significant first step towards meeting the growing demands they are experiencing for specialty pediatric emergency services.
He says the spaces were also renovated to make them more friendly and less intimidating for the children they treat and their families.
One of those patients is Zak, a 10-year-old resident of London, who was brought to the hospital by his mother when he fell at the playground and suffered an injury to his wrist.
The hospital says Zak was one of the first children treated in one of two new dedicated procedure rooms in the Children’s ED.
His mother, Zoe, says the experience left both her and her son feeling grateful for the outstanding care her son received.
“When we realized he was going to need special attention and care, it was amazing to know that everything was going to be right here,” she says.
“The way they treated Zak meant everything to me. The emergency department was very busy, but it didn’t feel that way to us. The attention and care we received made it feel like Zak was the only patient there.”
Hospital staff say the two new procedure rooms were designed to provide a private and calm environment for children who require specialized care. This can include repairing lacerations, removing foreign objects or, in Zak’s case, the administration of anesthesia and application of a cast for a broken bone in his wrist.
With the new room, the hospital says it was able to fully scan and treat Zak and send him home in a little under five hours.
As one of Ontario’s few dedicated pediatric emergency departments, Children’s Hospital provides care to a geographic area covering a third of the province.
Each year, the team in the Children’s ED provides care through 47,000 visits for approximately 36,000 patients.
The expansion was made possible thanks to Ontario’s Ministry of Health and donors through the Children’s Health Foundation.
“Our government is taking action to ensure all Ontarians, at every stage of life, have access to the care they need, when and where they need it,” says Sylvia Jones, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health. “The expansion of London Health Sciences Centre’s Children’s Emergency Department is improving access to care for hundreds of families across the region and builds on our government’s historic $330 million investment in paediatric care.”
The construction began in early 2024, and the space opened this past fall. The space is being funded with $3 million in donor support to the Children’s Health Foundation.
The design process involved input and collaboration from various members of the paediatric emergency team, with Lim saying the priority was to maximize the number of care spaces.
“It’s been fantastic having this much-needed expansion,” says Lim. “We’ve had such extraordinary pressures that we needed a solution, and this has had an immediate impact on patient flow. We’ll need to continue growing our capacity alongside our growing community, but I’m proud of where we are right now.”