Ontario Hospitals Feel Pressure From Staff Making Sick

About 100 staff members call patients at University Health Network hospitals a day.

More than 150 workers at a London hospital have tested positive for the virus.

Four hundred Hamilton Health Sciences staff are in isolation due to exposure to COVID-19.

As Omicron crosses Ontario, hospitals across the province say they face a new kind of challenge: a wave of staff absences forcing them to consider canceling scheduled medical treatments or calling back earlier. isolated personnel at work.

Gillian Howard, spokesperson for the University Health Network, said this was the case in the Greater Toronto Area, not just at UHN.

“We see huge numbers of staff making themselves sick – about 100 a day – either with exposure that needs to be assessed by health services or because they are sick,” Howard told The Star. “We are currently working on advice from the Chief Medical Officer of Health and Ontario Health on how we will manage through January. “

Howard said the actions they will take will include redeploying staff and reducing scheduled care. UHN employs around 17,200 people.

Unlike previous COVID waves, it is Omicron’s unprecedented transmissibility, rather than its severity, that is straining the healthcare system. As hospitals fill more and more COVID-19 patients, there has been proportionately less need for intensive care compared to previous waves. This means that while there may not yet be the same demand for staff to handle large numbers of critically ill patients, the large number of cases and potential exposures may force more healthcare workers out. isolate, where they are not able to help.

“We usually don’t have calls on weekends, but we had to have everyone on deck because we had six or seven emergency COVID-19 cases,” said Julia Oosterman, communications manager at Bluewater Health in Sarnia. “Since yesterday we have started calling staff on vacation to see if they can return to work – this is not a desirable outcome. They really really need and deserve their vacation.

A total of 89 of Bluewater’s 1,800 staff are currently in isolation, Oosterman said. This is about four times the number of usual work stoppages.

“Due to widespread community transmission of the Omicron variant, the Ontario Hospital Association is actively working on emergency plans with health authorities with the goal of continuing essential hospital operations during this wave,” wrote Anthony Dale, President and CEO of the Association. . “Management over the next few months will only be possible if we continue to act as one health system. “

The spread of Omicron among hospital staff has led to policy changes in hospital networks and other jurisdictions. The Star reported last week that some nurses in Ontario were called back to work during times of isolation. The province of Quebec has said some COVID-positive healthcare workers will be called back to work, a plan its health minister Christian Dubé has called “a better alternative to non-care.”

Oosterman said she expects there may be some staffing between jurisdictions, noting that Bluewater has taken in patients from the GTA and Manitoba during the first waves of the pandemic and would help again if he had the ability.

In Quebec, the main hospital network announced Sunday that it would postpone half of its surgeries and appointments from Wednesday. The announcement came as Quebec faces an increase in the number of hospital cases, with more than 1,200 hospitalized with COVID as of Sunday, according to The Canadian Press.

In the UK, where Omicron has been operating for longer, the situation is similar – the large number of cases creating serious staffing problems in some areas.

“Right now (the National Health Service is) faced with a potential immediate emergency that they need to prepare for. The choice could potentially leave patients untreated or create additional temporary capacity, ”Chris Hopson, CEO of NHS Providers, an association representing healthcare workers, wrote in a Twitter thread on Saturday. “Unlike last January, there are currently far fewer seriously ill elderly people requiring intensive care… This is less of a problem with patient acuity, intensity of care and length of stay required. Plus one of the volume of the number of patients requiring general and acute beds.

Dr. Donald Vinh, an infectious disease specialist at the McGill University Health Center, says all Canadian provinces will likely have to choose whether or not to allow exposed staff to return to work in the coming days as the number of sick people increases. and that the pool of workers increases. available to process them shrinks.

“We are in a fixed and limited number of health care workers in each province, because there is no reservoir or pool of health workers that we can rely on to get us through here,” a he told The Canadian Press last week. .

Rob MacIsaac, CEO of Hamilton Health Sciences, said on Friday that the hospital was taking “extraordinary measures” to try to address its staffing shortages, including paying bonuses to staff who worked in their spare time and recalling staff from ‘asymptomatic isolation after a negative rapid test. results.

“We are again facing immense pressures regarding the occupancy and staffing of hospitals,” MacIsaac wrote on Dec. 31. declaration.

On New Years Eve, 152 staff at the London Health Sciences Center had tested positive for COVID, according to its website.

There are currently additional stressors for health workers, although they do not isolate them. When a nurse, administrative assistant, paramedic or personal support worker return from vacation, they sometimes encounter patients who resist their care.

“We are dealing with large groups of unvaccinated people, many of whom don’t believe in mainstream science,” Oosterman said. “So the tone within hospitals, the level of speech, has changed dramatically since the first wave.”

“It’s a real shame because the whole team is exhausted and coming back on vacation,” she said. “It’s very different from what it was before.”

With files from The Canadian Press