10 Health System Readiness Update shares plans for possibilities
The growth of COVID has placed considerable strain and stress on front line workers, who are a key resource in the COVID response.
“We are very concerned about the potential for ongoing exponential growth of the virus outpacing our ability to scale up and have our steps stay one or two steps ahead of the demand curve,” Miller noted.
They are specifically concerned about a drawing down of the labour pool, but these personnel are highly skilled staff so there is no simple labour market fix to staffing concerns.
“We anticipate this will be an ongoing challenge with high absentee rates of staff that are required to isolate either because they’re positive or because they are a contact to a positive case and therefore need to miss work.”
Recently, 17 nurses working in one hospital, which represented 15 per cent of the facilities workforce, were required to self-isolate after being identified as close contacts to positive cases linked to sporting events and community transmission. With this situation occurring with no notice, it shows the impact COVID could have on their ability to respond to helping patients.
Livingstone noted those various scenarios and reasons for planning spell out the importance of the public taking personal responsibility to keep themselves, and others, safe from COVID.
“While we do have checks in place they need to be abided by and we need Saskatchewan residents to do everything they can to do everything they can to help us fight COVID-19,” Livingstone said. “If Saskatchewan residents wouldn’t let this go unchecked, we would be sending Dr. Shaw and thousands of frontline workers in our healthcare system into a lions den. We’d be sending them to deal with exponentially more hospitalizations, more ICU admissions, and certainly more deaths. We’d be asking them to have more conversations with families whose loved ones aren’t going to make it. And we’d be sending a signal that our comfort is more important that theirs, and that their lives and the lives that they’re trying to protect are less important than ours. We need to send a different signal. Let’s double down. Let’s start supporting Public Health orders. Let’s start crushing this virus and numbers of contacts. We need your support to help do that.”
“And despite our best planning it would be inevitable for us to be overcome if we do not get the virus in check as
quickly as we can.”
Unlike the spring, when Saskatchewan’s healthcare system underwent a significant slowdown and change to service delivery, the SHA’S current plans are to find the right balance between providing care and services for both COVID and non COVID patients. These adjustments could be achieved through adapting services, delivering more virtual services, adopting an alternate level of care, or temporarily stopping certain services.
“All of our slowdowns are meant to be localized, targeted and as time limited as possible because as I mentioned we are very aware of the impact that we have on our patients.”
To date the province has eliminated some lower risk routine public health inspections, there have been some localized and time limited surgical slowdowns, along with postponing some non essential continuing care programs and non essential acute services like ambulatory and speciality programs.
“We are taking what we refer to as our “dimmer switch” approach over the long term, where we can scale up and scale down services as required in order to ensure that we can provide a robust response to COVID, but also be able to sustain non COVID services as much as can.”
Dr. Shaw stressed that now more than ever it is imperative that Saskatchewan residents all work together towards the same goal, and that slowing the spread of COVID is everyone’s top job.
“It’s so frustrating when I get emails, I get letters, I get phone calls, I get texts, I get tweets by people saying this isn’t real, you’re exaggerating, it’s not really happening, why are you doing this to us? I just have to say it is so real. I can not tell you enough how real this is. And we need everybody to see this as job number one.”
Livingstone added that without everyone taking all possible steps, Saskatchewan could be at an unimaginable breaking point.
“If comes to that point where we talking about completely being overwhelmed, those are war time conditions. Those are not normal, healthcare everyday service conditions. And that’s what the risk is with not containing the virus.”