Former Commonwealth school to be used for primary care access

Plans are in the works to use the former Commonwealth Public School, which sits across the street from Brockville General Hospital (BGH). BGH officially acquired the property from the Upper Canada District School Board in March, although the hospital's intention to buy the building was established much earlier. The building was used as an overnight warming centre for the homeless from mid-January to the end of April, as a stopgap measure following the closure of the Co-Operative Care Centre on Dec. 31. Now that the building has officially been vacated, hospital officials are eyeing the facility to be used as a primary care hub. 'We're in the early stages of discussions on the building's use, but there is a vision to use it as a space for people that do not have a primary care physician,' said BGH chief executive officer Julie Caffin. 'We would like to create a health hub where people who do not have a primary care provider will have an alternate place to go other than the emergency department.' There is no timeline on when this hub would be up and running – Caffin said the hospital is still waiting on funding, staff, building renovations and the acquisition of equipment. She hopes it will be operational in the near future in order to relieve some of the pressure on the emergency department. 'There's a lot of work being done to attach people to a family doctor, but there's still a gap,' said Caffin. 'People are coming to our emergency department because they don't have anywhere else to go. We don't know when this hub will be open, but it won't be years.' The lack of family doctors in the area is undoubtedly putting a strain on BGH's emergency department, and it's not the only department feeling the pinch. All of BGH is overloaded, and has been running over capacity for years. As of last week, Caffin said the hospital is running at 175 per cent occupancy in its acute care spaces. There were 39 more patients in the hospital than there are beds, meaning hospital staff had to place patients in places where they normally wouldn't be. Of those 39 patients, 30 of them were in unintended spaces, and nine were waiting in the emergency department for a bed. All of this was happening before cold and flu season, meaning the hospital's load is likely only to get bigger as the fall season progresses. 'The numbers are very high,' said Caffin. 'We're doing what we can to manage this, and our staff and physicians are incredible. The opening of the G. Tackaberry and Family Home is helping with the occupancy, since they're taking up to nine patients over the next couple weeks.' These occupancy issues are a big reason why BGH acquired the former Commonwealth school in the first place – the hospital is well past its limits and is in need of more space. The long-term goal for the Commonwealth property is to redevelop it for hospital expansion, although those plans are very far away from becoming a reality. 'The initial reason we were interested in that property is for long-term redevelopment,' said Caffin. 'We are very landlocked at our location, so we had nowhere to expand for any future redevelopment. We have options: we can knock the building down to build new, we could build a new parking lot, along with other options now that we have that real estate to work with.'