HOSPITALS RUSH TO CLEAR BEDS FOR COVID-19 CASES
Patients released early, seniors moved as province aims to free up 2,250 spaces
At this time of year, Alberta’s busiest urban hospitals typically run at 101 to 104 per cent capacity — overstuffed, as usual.
But COVID-19 is here, and Alberta Health Services is urgently trying to free up and create 2,250 spaces by April 15.
The province currently has 8,500 hospital beds. By the time the great exodus and additions are done, the occupancy rate will drop to about 75 per cent.
Hospital capacity routinely expands and contracts like a gigantic bellows, depending on the severity of the flu season.
But there has never been a challenge remotely like finding those 2,250 spaces to fight a pandemic.
“These are truly extraordinary times,” says Dr. Mark Joffe, AHS vice-president and medical director.
“We have teams all over the province, working closely together so this whole effort is tightly co-ordinated in the most efficient way possible.
“Incredible women and men are doing amazing work for very long hours, to meet what we know will be increasing demand.”
Closed wards and beds will be reopened. Patients will be treated in hospital hallways, alcoves and even waiting rooms. Some surgery suites are to be turned into intensive-care units.
Seniors are being shifted out of acute care beds at a much more rapid rate than normal.
Well-known filmmaker Chris Leeson recently got a call from AHS. He was asked to pick up his dad, John Leeson, 91, who was in rehabilitation for a hip fracture suffered in a fall at home.
Therapists thought he could leave more than a week before scheduled. His son agreed.
“When I got him home I was amazed at how well he did,” says Chris Leeson.
“They really did their job. He was definitely ahead of schedule.
“And he’s absolutely delighted to be in his own home.”
Joffe says that’s an example of how it should work — a person leaves rehab, is replaced by a patient from an acute bed and that acute space opens up for a potential COVID-19 patient.
But Joffe knows many cases won’t be as smooth as the Leesons’.
“There’s no question about that,” he says.
“We have to look at what supports might be put in place.
“It may be that families will have to pitch in a little more than they might have in the past.
“We’ll certainly be looking at home care services to help move people out of hospital even a day earlier or two days earlier than they might have otherwise.
“We need to look at every possible way that we can to reduce the need for hospital services and move people through the system as quickly and efficiently as we can.”
At the same time, he says, AHS has to have operating rooms free for NON-COVID patients needing emergency and urgent procedures.
It will be very tight in the hospitals.
The space crunch “may mean adding a third bed to a two-bed room, or a fifth bed to a four-bed room,” says Joffe.
AHS has set itself two deadlines — to clear 1,500 beds by April 8 and another 750 by April 15.
The first cluster comes mainly from postponement of elective surgeries as well as moving seniors.
The second phase will be a kind of medical scavenger hunt — “utilizing overcapacity spaces such as alcoves, hallways, unused operating rooms,” says a written statement from AHS.
Officials pledge that no patient will be moved if doing so is medically risky or inappropriate.
Other provinces are taking similar measures. B.C., for instance, has reduced its hospital occupancy rate to 68 per cent in the face of its deeper COVID-19 crisis.
About 3,600 vacant hospital spaces have been created.
All this is painful but necessary. And AHS, with its unique provincewide mandate, is probably the best-prepared system in Canada to do it.
I asked Joffe what happens if the viral attack is even worse than expected, and many more beds are needed.
He gave the only real-world answer — “We are preparing for what we think is coming, the scenarios we think are most likely.”
AHS has often been criticized, even vilified, since its formation in 2008.
Now it faces the very crisis it was built for. May it succeed.