Windsor is getting its own Ronald McDonald House inside Windsor Regional Hospital.
It will open in the spring of 2016 and will give parents of critically ill children a place to find respite while their young ones are in hospital.
The house within a hospital will include five bedrooms on the third floor of the Met Campus and will allow families of sick children to take a nap, shower, or do laundry and still be by their child's side.
Lisa Dunn gets emotional thinking of how much the Ronald McDonald house helped her family while her son Thomas was in a London hospital. She spent two months there.
“We were able to not worry about what we were going to do, stay, where we were going to eat,” says Dunn. “Things like that were a comfort. You can’t put it into words.”
Hospital CEO David Musyj says this is exactly what the hospital stands for.
“Recognizing the value family has with loved ones,” says Musyj. “To have something like this, where loved ones have place to go, to take edge off, come back - we know that helps in healing process.”
Officials say 26 per cent of the families who use the Ronald McDonald House in London are from the Windsor area.
The house will move to the new single site acute care hospital when that is built.
