The Saskatchewan Health Authority has updated the first phase of its Dec. 3 COVID-19 surge activation plan to address the high volume of outbreaks threatening the care of patients and care home residents in the province.
New targets have been put in place to improve in several areas including testing, contact tracing, accommodation for patients seeking care and staffing.
SHA says staffing remains its biggest challenge due in large part to the number of COVID-19 cases in long-term care and personal care homes.
Hospitals aren’t as busy with patients receiving care in these homes, but the situation means more staff need to be moved from other areas of the health care sector to care homes.
“Our teams have responded extremely well to a very difficult situation,” said Scott Livingstone, SHA CEO.
“But sustained high caseloads and high numbers of outbreaks are straining staff capacity and requiring us to mobilize and redeploy high numbers of staff quickly, severely testing our ability to keep up with this virus.”
As of Thursday, SHA says it’s deployed about 90 staff on top of the 70 who have been moved to Parkside Extendicare in Regina.
The high volume of outbreaks also means staff are isolating more often, adding to the shortages.
SHA says it is still looking at ways to deploy more staff throughout the province.
In addition to further deployment, SHA is working on other ways to strengthen its response to the surge in cases.
- Continuing to identify sites of high risk and perform Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC) and safety inspections;
- Providing more IPAC and safety resources where there are outbreaks;
- Continuing to review and identify facilities that may have poor ventilation and mitigate risks;
- Identifying resource needs and redeployments required to support vaccine rollout to key sites with vulnerable residents/patients; and,
- Expanding point of care testing to facilitate early detection and rapid response to outbreak situations
SHA says it has also slowed down services in other areas of the health care system in order to move staff around. Several steps are being taken to reduce surgical volumes in major centres.
- Temporary, localized 35 percent reduction in surgical volumes in Saskatoon and Regina, except for third party surgical providers in these cities, who are not impacted.
- Temporary, localized disruption to all elective surgeries in North Battleford.
- Temporary, localized disruption to nearly all elective surgeries in Prince Albert.
- In all of these sites, urgent/emergent and cancer surgeries are prioritized and continue.
- Outside of these sites listed above in the other sites where surgeries are performed, elective surgeries and endoscopy procedures are continuing at relatively normal volumes.
“There are 150 long-term care facilities across the province, over 60 hospitals and hundreds and hundreds of personal care homes,” Livingstone said.
“Even if a fraction of these facilities experienced a similar challenge like Parkside, we would have to deploy hundreds of staff potentially thousands depending on what response was required.
“That’s why it’s critical for us to have these service slowdowns, part of our surge activation tool kit.”
Daily lab capacity for COVID-19 tests in Saskatchewan is about 3,400 per day. SHA hopes to be able to administer 4,000 tests per day by Dec. 31.
Right now, SHA says it is meeting target times for positive case notification, but are struggling to meet targets for contact notification and daily case monitoring.
From Dec. 8 to 14, there have been an average 262 cases per day. SHA hopes it will eventually be able to meet all contact tracing needs if cases moved to more than 500 per day.
Two hundred additional staff have been added to support contact tracing.
SHA has been working to create hospital capacity for 250 COVID-19 patients and provide care for 64 people in the Intensive Care Unit.
It says ICU admissions along with hospitalizations have remained below the forecasted surges, but again, it’s due to SHA’s emphasis on in-place treatment in care homes.
On Thursday, the province announced seven more deaths and 238 cases.
“I’ll obviously start by expressing my condolences to the families who have lost loved one,” said Dr. Saqib Shahab, Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer.
“This is a reminder of why we need to stay the course until all of us have gotten vaccinated. At least we can celebrate the fact we are seeing a plateau in cases.”
The province also announced that its COVID-19 vaccine delivery plan could begin before Christmas.
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