With rising COVID-19 infections and with hospitals across Ontario facing staff shortages and lengthy wait times, officials with London’s Children’s Hospital say they anticipate the upcoming cold and flu season will be much more challenging for already-strained local health-care workers.
Two factors in particular are playing into the uniqueness of this upcoming cold and flu season, the head of LHSC’s pediatric emergency department says — children being out of the classroom for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and an uncertainty about when the season will actually start.
“There is a phenomenon that when parents send their children to school for the first time, they’re sick for the whole year because they haven’t been exposed to viruses either in their life or ahead of time,” said Dr. Rod Lim, site chief of Children’s Hospital’s pediatric emergency department.
“But we know that children have basically been sheltered for two to two and a half years now, so the susceptibility of the population is very high and the mixing is almost back to pre-pandemic levels. So we do anticipate that this will be quite a challenging season.”
Lim adds that respiratory viruses are also not following historic time trends, meaning health-care workers don’t know when influenza will hit and whether it will correspond with other viruses that may be circulating, such as COVID-19, or respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.
“We’ve had viruses in the summer that we have never seen before in terms of that time of year,” he said, referring to RSV, which tends to be seen in February and March but was seen throughout the summer. Influenza season tends to arrive in December, heading into January and February, he said.
“We have no idea if it’s going to be earlier this year. All signs seem to indicate that it probably will. And we don’t know if it’s going to be more of a prolonged surge because of the vulnerability of the population,” he said.
“We know that in the southern United States they’re already starting to see the flu, which is early. So we anticipate that this is going to be a very difficult flu season for us. And we are already experiencing record volumes in our emergency department, both with acuity and with numbers.”
As a result, London-area parents are being urged to immunize their children against COVID-19 and influenza, and to keep family members home if they’re feeling sick to lessen viral transmission.
Past cold and flu seasons were milder as a result of measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, including mask mandates, physical distancing, and pandemic-related lockdowns and restrictions. During London’s last flu season, only 50 lab-confirmed cases were reported by the Middlesex-London Health Unit.
The messaging comes as LHSC contends with human resource challenges brought on by retirements, people leaving the profession for good, and frustration over frozen wages that have resulted in lengthy patient wait times.
Last week, the organization saw wait times of 18 hours or more during the afternoon of Oct. 6 for non-emergent and non-urgent matters at its University and Victoria hospital emergency departments, while in September, LHSC reported that it had 540 nursing vacancies it needed to fill.
“We are already running above our historic volumes for the month of September, and are forecasting a worsening caseload in the next few months,” for all respiratory viruses, Lim said.
The same challenges have been seen at other hospitals across the province.
According to Ontario Health data from August, the most recent month for which data is available, ER patients in the province waited 1.9 hours on average until first being assessed by a doctor. The average time emergency patients spent in hospital, if admitted, was 20.7 hours.
However, an Ontario Health report leaked this week by the Liberals said that in August, 90 per cent of ER patients waited up to 4.2 hours to first see a doctor and, if admitted, stayed in hospital for up to 44.1 hours, despite patient volumes being lower than in August 2021.
Lim says Children’s Hospital’s pediatric emergency department has felt the same pressures that the adult emergency department has when it comes to increased patient volumes and increased acuity, i.e., patients needing greater and more complex medical care.
“Not one shift goes by where we are not trying to juggle, be creative in order to try to see children in a timely fashion,” said Lim, who has been site chief of the pediatric emergency department for 15 years.
“Credit to my team for doing the best that they can to provide the kind of care that we believe in. But without a doubt, this is one of the most challenging times of my career in order to try to keep that care to the standard that we demand.”
— with files from Global News’ Colin D’Mello and The Canadian Press
Comments