Hospitals able to nearly triple critical-care capacity if needed, Shared Health says

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This article was published 05/11/2020 (1467 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Labour leaders are decrying plans to staff hundreds of new hospital beds as a “Band-Aid solution” to the impending surge in COVID-19 patients, as a system already under strain braces for another blow.

On Friday, Shared Health chief nursing officer Lanette Siragusa detailed how the province’s hospital system would cope with increasing demands for care, as a fraction of the thousands of active COVID-19 cases eventually need hospitalization.

If required, Shared Health can add up 173 more intensive care beds to its baseline of 72, with space mapped out at Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre, St. Boniface Hospital and Grace Hospital, and in Brandon, according to the organization that co-ordinates services in Manitoba.

However, staffing continues to be the greatest hurdle, Siragusa said — and planning is still underway to determine who will be caring for the seriously ill and how they’ll be supported.

“Any planning amidst a pandemic is going to be challenged by maintaining appropriate staffing to provide safe patient care, especially when physicians and staff themselves are susceptible to the illness, or required to self-isolate,” Siragusa said.

In critical and acute care situations, Siragusa said hospitals will be employing team-based staffing models to spread the workload across more hands.

For example, critical care nurses, who typically care for one patient at a time, will see their patient ratio increase with support from other health professionals and support workers, she said.

“We have experienced and specialized staff working in critical care, medicine, surgery and ambulatory care, and we will start by working with these existing teams as well as adding new individuals, former and future staff from all health professions,” Siragusa said.

Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson said shuffling staff and introducing workers from different disciplines into care settings — while stress levels are already high — will hurt the quality of care being offered.

“Bolstering front-line human resources is essential for responding to growing demand, and we recognize there is a need to adapt traditional models given the extremely high numbers we’re faced with,” Jackson said Friday.

“But let’s be clear: this is a last-minute pilot for an entirely new model of care when hospitals are already at capacity,” she said. “Government should have come up with a substantive plan to add capacity months ago, instead of rushing through a Band-Aid solution to an acute issue at the last minute.”

Siragusa said such planning has been ongoing since the spring, and Shared Health consulted with 23 regulatory bodies to develop the team-based model of care.

In the short-term, as surgeries are slowed down, surgical nurses will be moving into intensive care and medicine to become oriented with the wards, Siragusa said. Other staff who have been identified as having skill sets compatible for team-based care will be approached directly, as needed and as beds expand.

Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals president Bob Moroz said not enough was done ahead of COVID-19 numbers rising to prepare staff or to add additional resources to the system. 

“Instead, they continue to ask the same allied health professionals and other key staff to do even more with less, to stretch themselves to the max without any new resources or input into the plan,” Moroz said. “I just wonder how much longer they can stick with that approach before they burn everyone out and the system reaches the breaking point.”

Siragusa noted more than 100 community physicians have volunteered to move into the hospital system, as required. Since mid-October, just under three dozen more nurses have been added to the pool of casual COVID-19 crisis workers, which has a current roster of 405 people.

On Friday, 161 people were in hospital with COVID-19, including 20 in intensive care. Siragusa said critical care capacity as of that morning was at 94 per cent, while medicine bed capacity was at 80 per cent in Winnipeg.

The province is also preparing to increase capacity throughout the entire hospital system, and says it can add up to 1,014 acute-care beds.

Since the spring, the province has purchased an additional 215 ventilators to add to the 234 already in the system. It’s awaiting the delivery of 71 more. 

More than 800 basic medical and low-acuity beds, 150 additional critical-care beds, and 1,900 infusion pumps are also warehoused.

danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca

COVID-19 capacity plans