Two years in, no moving on from COVID-19 for Canada’s healthcare workers

MONTREAL

COVID-19 cases continue to roll into the two Torontoarea hospitals where Eram Chhogala works as a trauma nurse. The numbers have dwindled to a stream instead of a wave, but each is a reminder of what the disease has done and could possibly still do.

“Previously, we had high numbers and waves where people came in heavy bottlenecks, and I’m just wondering if it’s going to be the same thing again,” Chhogala said in a phone interview this week. “You know, it’s the wonder of, ‘Is this going to happen again?”’

With mask mandates and other COVID-19 health restrictions lifting, many Canadians are finally able to envision a return to normal life. But, as they face burnout, staff shortages and daunting procedural backlogs, some health workers say it isn’t so easy to move on.

Chhogala says she understands people’s desire to return to a more normal life. But she also worries that health measures such as mask mandates are lifting too quickly, while there’s still so much to do to ensure the health system is ready for another wave.

“A lot of people are probably really excited that they can go back to normal again, but I just don’t think that we’re at that normal yet,” she says.

Chhogala, 36, says no health worker has emerged unscathed from the pandemic.

They have had to watch wave after wave of very sick people struggle and die, she said. Many fell ill themselves. Some of her colleagues burned out and left the profession or plan to take early retirement. Later in the pandemic, health workers were harassed by anti-mask and anti-vaccine protesters.

Perhaps most devastatingly, Chhogala’s own father died of COVID-19.

“It changed the way we think, feel and act,” she says of the pandemic.

Last week, the Canadian Medical Association and some 40 organizations representing health workers called for urgent government action to address issues facing the ailing system.

“While governments and Canadians are hoping to move past the pandemic, an exhausted, depleted health workforce is struggling to provide timely, necessary care to patients and make progress through a significant backlog of tests, surgeries and regular care,” CMA president Katharine Smart said in a statement following an emergency meeting.

Among the challenges the system faces is a backlog of delayed surgeries and procedures that could take years to clear.

A report by the Ontario Medical Association last month found that the backlog in that province alone was more than one million surgeries. Manitoba’s delay had grown to over 161,000 diagnostic and surgical procedures as of mid-February, according to Doctors Manitoba, a group representing the province’s doctors.

In Quebec, hospitals across the province had to reduce surgeries by about 50 per cent at the height of the Omicron wave. Dr. Francois Marquis, the chief of intensive care at Montreal’s MaisonneuveRosemont hospital, says it will take months for the hospital to bring surgical waiting lists to their already daunting pre-pandemic levels.

Now that the number of COVID-19 patients has declined, officials are shifting to a different set of challenges: rebuilding the team, reopening beds and catching up on surgeries.