(SHA CEO Scott Livingstone at a media briefing/CJME News Staff)

By paNOW Staff

covid-19

SHA confirms latest surge plans as COVID cases escalate

Dec 3, 2020 | 3:13 PM

Amid the continued increase in COVID-19 cases, the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) is announcing the next phase of its surge plan to meet the expected demand for COVID-19 patients in the next two weeks.

In the next two weeks, the SHA is forecasting an average of 562 new COVID-19 cases per day, 250 COVID-19 patients in hospital, and 64 COVID-19 patients in intensive care.

Plans include the required service slowdowns to support the redeployment of up 600 full-time equivalent staff to support pandemic response. That will also include a group of 55 to 60 health care workers in six areas of the province that can be redeployed to address outbreaks and prevent service disruptions.

“You’ve already heard publicly that the pressures on our system are intense, and that is absolutely true. Teams are under intense pressure to manage the surge in COVID demand, while still providing everyday health services to residents in the province,” SHA CEO Scott Livingstone said. “To date, we’ve managed this pressure largely by maximizing our existing capacity — our ability to do that is over. Case surges have been too high, and projected case growth in the next two weeks is even higher. We need to act now, and we have.”

With the redeployment plans to address the increased COVID-19 demands, that means some areas of healthcare will experience a “partial service slowdown.” These areas include primary healthcare, surgery, endoscopy/cystoscopy, women, and children’s programming, diagnostics and therapies.

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“These are very difficult decisions,” Derek Miller, SHA emergency operations centre lead, said. “The people that did this work to identify and prioritize where we can redeploy resources, it’s very difficult to choose as we know that every time you reduce a service, you have a direct impact on a patient and on the care they need… They’re definitely not taken lightly.”

The SHA said its goal remains to avoid a broad reduction of services across all areas in the health care system.

Surge Plan

Highlights from the first phase of the surge plan being implemented include:

• Creating capacity for 64 COVID patients requiring ICU care by mid-December to try to keep pace with projected demand. This means creating capacity to meet demand that is equivalent to 28 per cent more ICU beds than currently exist right now in Saskatoon and Regina combined.
• Creating capacity for 250 COVID patients requiring inpatient hospitalization by mid-December to try to keep pace with projected growth in demand. This is approximately equivalent to the capacity of the Cypress Regional Hospital in Swift Current and the Prince Albert Victoria Hospital combined.
• Creating capacity for contact tracing of approximately 560 average cases per day to try to keep pace with projected growth in demand, including keeping pace with more than 6,000 hours of work per day created for contact tracers if cases reach this level by mid-December as projected.
• Strengthening the SHA’s supplemental labour pool to increase responsiveness to outbreaks and situations where large numbers of staff are required to isolate.

Next steps and communications processes

The services reduced or paused as part of this surge will be communicated through the service alerts page of the Saskatchewan Health Authority website as well as through proactive communications locally, where appropriate or required to support patient/family navigation of the health system.

For the complete media release issued Thursday click here.

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panews@jpbg.ca

On Twitter:@princealbertnow