Health authority looking to resume many health-care services in November

The Saskatchewan government has set a 50-75-90 goal for workers who were moved to help with the COVID-19 fourth wave surge to go back to their original jobs, and for some services to resume over the next three weeks.

Next week, half of those who can be moved are expected to go back to their old jobs. An emphasis is being put on child and youth services; Health Minister Paul Merriman said that’s because with kids there’s a developmental impact.

Some programming is set to resume by Nov. 11, including those autism services and child psychology programs that were slowed. Which other services come back after that will depend on the workers who are freed up.

The week after, 75 per cent of those who can be moved are expected in their original jobs, and by the end of the month that number is expected to be up to 90 per cent.

About 860 staff were moved from their original jobs and, at this point, only about 450 of them can be moved back — those who had been in contact tracing, test and assessment, and outbreak management.

The other 410 or so are in departments like intensive care units and immunizations where there is still a lot of pressure so they’ll be staying where they are for now.

“Within the SHA, we certainly want to see us in a position where we can resume services, get things back up and running, back to normal, as quickly as we can. But our reality is that we’re not there yet. We still have over 200 COVID patients hospitalized right now,” said Derek Miller, the Saskatchewan Health Authority’s chief of emergency operations.

Almost 350 services were slowed down in some way at the beginning of the fourth wave, with 250 partial slowdowns and 85 services that were completely turned off.

Miller said people will be moving back to various programs, but the team is still working through what the services will be. In some cases, there will be partial resumptions.

He said the SHA will be able to report back on which actual services are coming back in the coming days.

When it comes to continuing needs in areas like contact tracing, Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency president Marlo Pritchard said officials are looking at other options like third-party private providers.

“It’ll be based on a needs assessment and ensuring that the required contact tracing takes place and we’ll be finding resources,” said Pritchard.

However, Miller said because daily cases are down, the need for some of those workers is down.

“We had surged up to be able to manage hundreds of cases a day that we’re not experiencing right now, so our reality is that we are at a point where we have resources that can be redeployed back to home units to resume services,” said Miller.

However, Miller also said the SHA is maintaining a surge posture to allow for high demand. Pritchard said officials will continue planning, looking at trends and modelling, but there is no particular trigger that would stop the resumption of services or move workers back to COVID positions.