'Early on in this wave, we had 1,000 staff members off work every day': UHN's head of critical care on how ICUs are coping with the hospital crisis

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'Nurses will finish a 12-hour shift and be asked if they can stay for an extra four hours because they’re short-staffed,' says UHN’s head of critical care:

Niall Ferguson is the head of critical care medicine at Toronto Western Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital and Toronto General Hospital. Here, he talks about why the Omicron-induced wave is unlike anything he’s seen, how hospitals are preparing for a jump in cases and his family’s own brush with Covid over the holidays.It’s come quite recently. Doctors in Ontario have been following Omicron cases in the community since early December.

All those facts may be true, but they’re forgetting that they still might be the one in 100 who do get sick. And even if they don’t get super sick themselves, they’re still contributing to the spread of Covid in the community and its effect on other people.It’s frustrating and sad. I think that most people who haven’t been vaccinated are scared, misinformed or don’t have all the facts. And I think that many of them, when they get sick, end up regretting it.

At the hospital level, at the beginning of this wave, we had 1,000 staff members at UHN off work every day, half being infected and half being exposed. If you get unlucky and have 30 nurses scheduled to work and suddenly 10 of them are not able to, that’s a one-third reduction in our workforce for the next 12 hours. Our nurse managers are doing a huge amount of work trying to balance out the staff who are available to work at our ICUs. Every day, there’s a request for them to work overtime.

 

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