An early viral season mixed with an already stretched hospital system is slowing down routine care across Hamilton, even cancelling surgeries, according to local health care executives.
The largest of the institutions, Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) says it’s already cancelled some elective and scheduled care over the last two weeks just to keep up with an uptick in overall admissions.
“We have done everything that we can in order to prevent that and also to try to ensure always that time-sensitive care proceeds,” HHS operations executive vice-president and COO Sharon Pierson revealed.
“But we have cancelled cardiac cases, we have cancelled oncology cases, and we have cancelled arthroplasty cases.”
Pierson says both Hamilton General and the Juravinski are struggling with high patient occupancy with the latter seeing about 50 more patients each day than it’s equipped to handle.
Meanwhile, McMaster Children’s Hospital (MCH) is reported be operating at 112 per cent capacity, while West Lincoln Memorial Hospital is at 114 per cent.
Close to 120 alternative-level care (ALC) patients are residing in the joint HHS-St. Joe’s satellite health facility on King Street East at Catharine Street.
Pierson said 270 total ALC patients in the joint system are waiting to move into either long-term care, supportive housing, rehab, palliative care or seeking to go home with some sort of support.
MCH president Bruce Squires says the pediatric surgical wait list for the hospital was at about 2400 patients as of the end of September, about 63 per cent having waited longer than clinically recommended.
But Squires did admit he was pleased with surgery numbers at the end of the summer, stabilizing and even coming down in areas compared to previous years.
“We have more work to do in terms of fully staffing up, particularly as it relates to pediatric anesthesiology and really optimizing the amount of surgical activity that we’re doing,” he said.
“But we’re making progress.”
St. Joe’s EVP of clinical operations and chief nursing executive Cheryl Williams says they’ve not yet had to postpone similar care and services, but says their facilities are operating beyond 100 per cent occupancy to meet demands.
“At this point, we’ve been able to manage that through our staffing processes of really our teams and our units going over capacity without at this point having to curtail any other activity,” Williams explained.
Executives at both local hospitals pointed to patients needing acute care as a major factor in creating backlogs.
HHS has some 93 COVID patients across its network but less than five in intensive care.
Williams says St. Joe’s is seeing upticks in more “complex patients” needing psychiatric emergency services, both inpatient and outpatient.
The two networks acknowledged retention and recruitment strategies have been beefed up and have efforts underway to offer more flexibility with existing staff this flu season.
“We are deeply involved in the International Nursing Initiative and recruiting actively,” said Pierson.
“We have centralized recruitment efforts within HHS, which is a relatively new initiative to help with more expeditious hiring in those areas.”
St. Joe’s is also involved with the international nursing program and also has support positions for new grads as a way of also developing skills.
COVID, RSV cases rising in Hamilton
The city’s medical officer of health said COVID cases are on the rise amid an increase in wastewater signals, some recorded positive tests and 12 reported institutional outbreaks across Hamilton as of Wednesday.
Dr. Elizabeth Richardson characterized influenza monitoring as “sporadic” but “stable” saying public health is only dealing with the “occasional case here and there.”
“RSV, on the other hand, test positivity and wastewater signal have increased and we don’t have as much information on RSV because it’s not reportable like the other two viruses,” Richardson said.
“We are hearing from around the province that there is some increase elsewhere that is going on … that is something that we’re concerned about.”
Richardson says pharmacies across the city have the flu shot and many other outlets have received the latest COVID vaccine, XBB.
Those considered to be at high risk, like individuals over 65, health care workers as well as racialized and other equity-deserving communities are on the priority list for the shot.
Both the flu and COVID vaccines can be administered at the same appointment.
More information can be found on the city’s website.
Comments