Emergency departments in many major Canadian cities face staff shortages due to an increase in COVID-19 cases across the country, with police, ambulances and firefighters all scrambling to redeploy and strengthen their ranks.
The highly transmissible variant of Omicron is already forcing businesses large and small in Canada to shut down, as infected or potentially infected employees are forced into self-isolation. But absenteeism is also becoming a problem for some emergency services.
For example, many police departments across the country are reporting higher levels of their frontline officers absent due to illness or isolation caused by COVID-19.
“There is a lot of concern and it is having an impact,” said Tom Stamatakis, National President of the Canadian Police Association.
Not all cities are impacted. The Vancouver Police Department said on Wednesday it currently has no concerns about staffing levels.
But in Winnipeg, the city’s police chief on Wednesday said he was declaring a “state of emergency” for the Winnipeg Police Service as it now faces “real challenges ahead.”
“The current COVID-19 situation has had a significant impact on our personnel resources,” Chief Danny Smyth said in a statement.
Of the approximately 1,900 police service employees, there are currently 90 active COVID-19 cases with 170 staff on COVID-19-related leave, he said. The declaration of a state of emergency gives him more latitude in the redeployment of officers to strengthen the ranks of the general patrol.
Other cities also face shortages of police personnel. In Edmonton, about eight percent of police service personnel are absent due to COVID-19.
And in Calgary, the city’s police department currently has the highest number of coronavirus infections among employees since the start of the pandemic, according to Susan Henry, head of the Calgary Emergency Management Agency (CEMA).
“To minimize disruption to emergency services, Calgary Police have started redeploying officers from other areas of the organization to support frontline workers who are already stretched before this wave of COVID-19,” said she said in a press release Wednesday morning. conference.
This will impact other services provided by the Calgary Police, including proactive community policing, youth intervention and support services, as well as the increased length of investigations for some offenses, she said. declared.
However, Stamatakis of the Canadian Police Association said that so far, despite shortages of police personnel, he has yet to hear of massive cases of infection that have affected the deployment.
The Omicron surge has caused a major disruption for the workforce across Canada, including healthcare workers, police and firefighters, and experts warn that this could only be the beginning. 1:58
“I think the way this affects deployment at the moment has been managed either by redeploying resources or bringing in people in overtime,” he said.
For the most part, he believes police will still have the resources to deploy 911, life-threatening calls and security calls. But there may not be the ability to send units for less serious crimes, he said.
“You are redeploying your resources, you are starting to regroup units, monitoring units, investigation units. But the problem is that the work is not done and it stays there,” he said. -he declares.
“Which then compromises the likelihood of successfully investigating and ultimately prosecuting. “
Along with the police, COVID-19 is also impacting the numbers of firefighters and paramedics in some cities.
Erin Madden, spokesperson for the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service, said in an email to CBC News that about five percent of their workforce has confirmed COVID-19.
“The department continues to monitor the situation closely and has so far been able to cover most of the staff shortages through overtime,” she said.
In Nova Scotia, Charbel Daniel, executive director of provincial emergency health services operations, which operates the province’s ambulance system, told CBC News in an email that “there is no doubt that we Feel a similar strain on the resources and scheduling of our staff as other health care providers in Nova Scotia and jurisdictions around the world.
In Edmonton, Edmonton Fire Department Chief Joe Zatylny said on Wednesday nearly five percent of the force’s frontline firefighters are currently off work due to COVID-19. Zatylny said they would replace staff by using staff on leave to ensure “we can meet our demands for basic services.”
In a statement, the Vancouver Fire Department said, “We are certainly seeing an increase in the number of employees, but we are still maintaining our response capabilities for the city of Vancouver.”
Chris Ross, president of the Montreal Firefighters Association, said that since the start of the pandemic, around 325 members have tested positive for COVID-19. But nearly 200 of them have been in the past two to three weeks.
“One case is positive and then within a few days we have three or four or five or six other guys who were in close contact at the same station who develop symptoms and also test positive., ” he said. “So it presented some unique staffing challenges that I don’t think we’ve had to face before.”
Staff shortages are addressed through voluntary and compulsory overtime and, in some situations, bringing back those who have been infected only five days after their isolation, he said.
As for the real impact of the staffing shortage on the public, it will likely go unnoticed “in the sense that your first fire engine will probably arrive more or less at the same time,” Ross said.
“But the second, third, fourth, fifth, or the extra fire trucks that would show up in an incident. These are the ones that are going to come a little further.”
Earlier this week, Matthew Pegg, general manager of emergency management for the City of Toronto, said their firefighters were first sent to low priority calls to ensure paramedics are free to answer calls involving serious injuries or requiring transport to hospital.
“Response times, especially for low priority calls, may increase from pre-pandemic levels,” he said.
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