The president of one of Canada’s largest pediatric hospitals says the facility’s emergency department (ED) has seen “strain” amid large volumes of admissions in recent months with many cases attributed to “high viral activity.”
McMaster Children’s Hospital executive Bruce Squires says the unit’s occupancy hit 130 per cent earlier this week including some 200 visits to the ED on Monday alone.
“We’re seeing really high viral activity in general across the province,” Squires told 900 CHML’s Good Morning Hamilton.
“At Mac Kids in September, our emergency department volumes were 20 per cent higher than in a typical year.”
At 100 per cent capacity a hospital is considered full, with all provincially-funded beds taken. Squires says in ideal times a typical HHS facility would operate at about 85 to 90 per cent occupancy.
In a statement on Thursday, Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) said its hospitals were under “extreme pressure” with occupancy at around 110 per cent, creating longer waits for care.
Dr. Kuldeep Sidhu, chief of emergency medicine at HHS, cited five reasons for the issues – lack of staff, high patient numbers, slow discharge of patients, more viral illnesses, and Hamilton’s notoriety for taking care of some of the “sickest” people from other southern Ontario communities.
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“Despite these very real pressures, it’s still vitally important for anyone needing emergency care to go to the ED,” added Sidhu.
“Depending on your health-care issue, you may have to wait, but this is because our most critically ill or injured patients are more in need.”
Squires says it’s not out of the ordinary for viral illnesses to become a primary cause of admissions in the fall and somewhat downplayed recent surges of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) as a primary driver in HHS cases.
“We have a small number of cases, and as I consult my colleagues around the province, that’s not yet a pressure point in terms of either visits to our emergency departments or the rate of hospitalization,” Squires explained.
This week Health Canada’s website reported the federal positivity rate for RSV, for the week ending Oct. 15, was 3.5 per cent.
The Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS) characterized that RSV rate as “above-expected levels for this time of year” — leading to a surge of cases in ERs and hospitals across the country.
Canada recorded just 239 cases of RSV between August 2020 and May 2021, compared with nearly 19,000 in 2019, Global News reported previously. This year, the number stands at 486.
Dr. Timothy Sly, epidemiologist and professor emeritus with Toronto Metropolitan University, says the bump in RSV numbers likely can be attributed to some COVID protocols in recent times which kept people away from each other thus lowering natural immunity.
“So we don’t have those antibodies that we would have picked up just by being with people, talking with people, being in the same room, shaking hands and so on,” Sly told 900 CHML’s Hamilton Today.
Ultimately, he concurs with his HHS colleagues in pointing out that the flu, COVID and now RSV combined are the latest stressors on the province’s health-care system.
“It’s already on its last legs in terms of many hospitals having to cancel diagnostic procedures, cancel many surgeries,” Sly remarked.
“If you go there for even an ordinary broken bone, or something, you have to wait for many, many hours which is not something that you did before.”
Sidhu is urging those who are generally healthy but believe they’ve taken on a mild viral infection to seek non-emergency options like a family doctor or an urgent care centre, or to contact Health Connect Ontario to speak with a registered nurse via phone or web chat. This way, EDs would be freed up for those who have another affliction that weakens their immune system and could be complicated via a respiratory illness.
Squires says anyone with acute symptoms like difficulty breathing or high fever should got to Emergency.
“Certainly, if your child is experiencing significant difficulty breathing or an extended or particular high fever, then you may want to visit, in our case, McMaster Children’s Hospitals’ emergency department,” he said.
– with files from Global News’ Aya Al-Hakim and The Canadian Press
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