TORONTO – Emergency in hospitals across Canada. And Covid-19 is not the first cause of the “suffering” of the structures: the problem is the shortage of the staff. 

We had already written this in recent weeks, but the emergency is far from over as evidenced by the decision of Peel Memorial Hospital, in Brampton, to reduce working hours: on Sunday it closed at 17, instead of at 21 as usual. “Like other hospitals, we too are facing major challenges due to the limited human resources available and we continue to study every possible strategy to help our teams continue to provide the best care to our community”, said the William Osler Health System.

On Monday the center reopened with normal hours. The emergency wards of Brampton Civic Hospital and Etobicoke General Hospital remain, at least for the moment, open. But various emergency rooms and emergency care centers across the province of Ontario have been forced into forced closures and reduced hours in recent weeks, including hospitals in Clinton, Kingston and Perth, Ontario.

The staff shortage has been fueled by the same workers who left hospital roles or the profession after more than two grueling years at the forefront of the pandemic, organizations representing nurses, doctors and public hospitals in the province say.

“The staff shortage is (due to) burnout and people leaving”, Ontario Nurses’ Association president Cathryn Hoy said last week. “But the reason they are running out is because they go in for an 8 or 12 hour shift and stay 16 hours. Sometimes they stay up to 24 hours”. Hoy said she collected testimonies from some nurses that the emergency rooms are equipped with a single nurse to cover thirty patients and, in many cases, patients are treated in the corridors. “One nurse can’t be everywhere,” she said.

The Ontario Ministry of Health, for its part, said the province is working to strengthen the capacity of the workforce by offering flat-rate bonuses and providing funds to recruit more nurses for the province’s most distressed areas. In such a situation, obviously a health emergency like that of Covid-19 only makes the situation even more complicated: infections and hospitalizations, in fact, are on the increase again. “There is this perfect storm descending upon us, which is increasing the volumes of sick patients with dwindling resources to respond to the emergency”, said Dr Alan Drummond, a physician at Perth hospital. And probably the worst is yet to come.

Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay