Wildfire forces evacuation of Roseway Hospital

Patients sent to hospitals in Bridgewater and Lunenburg

At 5:15 p.m. on Wednesday, the call Nova Scotia Health and the staff at Roseway Hospital in Shelburne County had been preparing for came.

It was time to evacuate the hospital.

Not because of an out-ofcontrol fire that has been devouring much of Shelburne County for days, but because of a new wildfire that had erupted in the Municipality of Shelburne much too close for comfort.

“We received a call from the field that there was an out-ofcontrol fire approximately a kilometre-and-a-half adjacent to the hospital,” said Tanya Nixon, the Western Zone VP of operations for Nova Scotia Health.

This evacuation was not a spur-of-the-moment thing. The health authority and Roseway Hospital staff always practice and prepare for evacuation scenarios. With the evolving and ongoing wildfire situation in Shelburne County, they began preparing for a potential evacuation days earlier.

It could not have gone more smoothly, said Nixon.

“We received the initial call at 5:15 and by 7:15 all of the patients and most of the staff were out of the building. And by eight o’clock, the building was secured, locked and we called it all clear,” she said.

“The staff, the entire team, both on-site and off, were incredibly calm and acted with an immense amount of precision,” she added. “I’m so proud of them.”

Roseway’s total in-patient capacity is 22 patients. There were 15 patients to evacuate.

Nixon explains that at the beginning of the week, an incident management team was pulled together. Its role was to closely monitor the situation and to commence planning for a possible worst-case scenario.

A Nova Scotia Health team of approximately six leaders was sent to Shelburne to support the site as the intensity on the ground continued to grow.

Throughout the week the hospital had already started to experience some air quality concerns so possibly evacuation was on the minds of many. But Wednesday the issue was forced on them due to the encroaching wildfire.

Nova Scotia Health’s team on the ground was also working virtually with an incident management team and Roseway staff.

“Very quickly, we identified 11 in-patients that we could transport via bus. We used bus because they could sit up for a reasonable amount of time,” Nixon said.

Those 11 patients and three staff were transferred to Fisherman’s Memorial Hospital in Lunenburg. There, a care team assessed the patients upon arrival, provided them with something to eat, and set them up in in-patient beds.

Four patients at Roseway had previously been assessed as not fit to travel by bus so they were transported by ambulances to South Shore Regional Hospital in Bridgewater where health-care staff awaited their arrival.

EVERYONE DOING WELL

At the time of the evacuation, the Roseway emergency department was open with three patients present. All three were triaged and treated. One of the patient did require further diagnostic testing in the form of a CT scan. Some physician-to-physician discussions occurred and arrangements were made for the patient to access further testing at the hospital in Bridgewater.

“Everyone is doing incredibly well today, which we’re happy to report,” Nixon said on Thursday, the day after the evacuations.

She said deciding which hospitals to send patients to was based on where the greatest access for beds existed.

“We worked all week to identify where we had the greatest access to beds and we had the greatest access to beds in Lunenburg and Bridgewater,” she said.

Although getting to the Yarmouth Regional Hospital would not have been as easy an option travel-wise given the wildfire situation in Shelburne County, had that been the option they would have proceeded with it.

The day before the evacuation occurred, Nova Scotia Health and Roseway staff met with patients and families to advise them of the evacuation possibility. There have been ipads sourced for patients so they can keep in touch with families who are unable to travel either because of distance or because of their own personal circumstances due to the fires.

As for Roseway Hospital staff, some have been sent to Lunenburg to support the patients sent there. Some have been reassigned to Queens General Hospital to support the emergency department there. Some staff are working from home.

Nova Scotia Health has added options for extended access to primary health care to residents of Shelburne County. Initially, there were going to be primary care appointments offered at the Shelburne Family Practice on Lake Road from May 31 to June 2 but that location is now in an evacuation zone. Other options have been put in place elsewhere in the county and also in Yarmouth and Liverpool.

Nixon added there is ongoing work taking place to try to diminish emergency department closures at the Queens General Hospital in Liverpool, given that Roseway is now closed for an unknown timeframe.

Asked what conditions will have to exist to reopen Roseway Hospital and bring patients and staff back, Nixon said it’s a difficult question to answer. This decision will be dependent on the emergency response providers and their expertise.

RETURN WILL TAKE TIME

But like the days of planning that went into the evacuation, a reopening will take time too.

“Once the evacuation order is cleared, we will have to undergo a series of steps to ready the facility for patients to return,” Nixon said.

“When you evacuate a building due to fire, you have to bleed the boilers and flush the line to avoid a potentially catastrophic event. You just don’t flick a switch and those boilers come back on. So there will be a little bit of a ramp-up period of time,” she said. “We have commenced planning efforts around what that would look like and how that would be staged.”

Of course, like many in Shelburne County, there is staff at Roseway Hospital also dealing with the personal impacts of the wildfires. The Barrington Lake fire, which by Thursday morning had surpassed 18,170 hectares and is the largest wildfire in Nova Scotia history, has led to the evacuation of more than 2,000 residents. The new Lake Road fire that started Wednesday has also seen more forced evacuations.

Nixon said Nova Scotia Health staff, not just at Roseway Hospital, but in other parts of the province too are dealing with direct and indirect impacts of the wildfires.

“This has been incredibly stressful for lots of folks that work for us that are also caring for patients. We really are trying hard to support our leaders, our providers, our front-line staff to the greatest extent possible,” she said. “We’re providing access to virtual and in-person mental health support. We have an excellent employee assistance program and we’re supporting leaders to have really important conversations with their staff.”

“This is a trying time. We have to lead with compassion while we’re providing compassionate care,” Nixon said. “It’s just a difficult situation.”

She adds the saying “it takes a village” definitely applies to this situation.

“To be able to move staff and patients out of a facility in less than three hours and the amount of support we received from patients’ families, front-line staff, physicians, health-care leaders, both onsite and off site, really was remarkable on Wednesday.”