Hospitals strapped for staff

TORONTO • Some hospitals in Ontario are cancelling or postponing medical procedures in the face of another wave of the coronavirus pandemic, increasing backlogs of procedures that health

practitioners say will take years to work through and could cost more lives.

There are some signs the sixth COVID-19 wave may be peaking in Ontario. But hospitals are facing a double whammy of new COVID infections and health workers off sick or isolating due to COVID.

COVID hospitalizations in Ontario are below their January peak but, as a lagging indicator, keep rising after estimated infections may be peaking.

Health worker absences are hitting operations when burnout is high and as hospitals struggle to cope with years of deferred care, administrators say.

Between 225,000 and 250,000 people in Ontario are awaiting surgeries, up from about 200,000 before the pandemic.

This week the Montfort Hospital in Ottawa had to postpone “non-urgent interventions” — about five per cent of the surgeries and procedures scheduled for Tuesday, a spokesperson said.

“We don’t know exactly how long we will have to postpone procedures; the situation is changing rapidly and we are reassessing the need to reduce activity every day, which depends very much on our staff returning to work in the next few weeks,” the spokesperson added.

The Kingston Health Sciences Centre had not yet returned to 100 per cent surgical capacity. Over the last few weeks, the hospital has seen “a small number of ad hoc operating room cancellations” for non-emergency procedures due to staff shortages, according to a statement.

In the first waves of the pandemic, the centre cut as much as 70 per cent of surgeries. But it found patients whose procedures were cancelled would worsen and end up in the emergency department, Chief Operating Officer Renate Ilse said.

And there is less room to cut now, Ilse said. After two years of pandemic “there’s a lot of accumulated deferred care.”

Hospitals are strapped for staff. The vacancy rate in the health and social assistance sector was 5.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2021, the highest quarter since at least 2015, according to Statistics Canada.

“We hear a lot of conversations that say we should start planning to just live like this and manage like this. I don’t think we could do that, from a staffing perspective,” Ilse said.