SHA updates its COVID response surge activation plan

The Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) continues to juggle staff and resources to manage during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an update Thursday to the surge activation plan it announced Dec. 3, the authority laid out some of the things that have happened over the past two weeks.

“Given the high case counts, which are levelling off, the large number of outbreaks in our hospitals and our care homes, we still require extraordinary efforts just to keep our system from being overwhelmed,” said SHA CEO Scott Livingstone.

Livingstone explained it’s requiring the authority to mobilize and redeploy a lot of staff quickly.

Livingstone pointed to Parkside Extendicare, which he said is the single-biggest outbreak in the province. He said the SHA has had to redeploy 70 workers to help deal with the outbreak. He said there are 150 other long-term care homes in the province.

“If even a fraction of these facilities experienced a similar challenge like Parkside, we would have to deploy hundreds of staff, potentially thousands, depending upon what response was required,” said Livingstone.

That’s why, Livingstone said, it’s so important to be able to implement service slowdowns and free up staff to respond. He said the authority also needs extra staff to help with testing and contact tracing efforts, and to help with life-saving programs like point-of-care testing and the vaccine delivery project.

“Both of these require extra staff. They will not get done without extra resources,” said Livingstone.

The SHA previously said it would be slowing down some services, and Thursday’s update detailed where those have occurred to date.

The authority has approved slowdowns for about 200 of the more than 900 services from which the SHA was looking to move staff and resources. However, many of those services are to continue until staff need to be shifted for the response to COVID.

So far, there has been a temporary 35 per cent reduction in surgeries in Saskatoon and Regina. That doesn’t include third-party surgical providers who aren’t impacted. There also have been temporary disruptions to elective surgeries in North Battleford and Prince Albert.

Urgent/emergent and cancer surgeries are continuing in those centres.

The SHA also has increased safety precautions for aerosol-generating medical procedures, which is said could create a higher risk of transmission. That has caused delays in those procedures.

Since Dec. 3, the SHA has identified 377 employees it can move from those areas into pandemic response, or 64 per cent of the target it had set.

The SHA noted that hospitalizations due to COVID have stayed below the levels it predicted two weeks ago, but that’s a result of staff going into long-term care homes instead of the patients moving into hospitals and intensive care units.

The authority has been looking at having a pool of workers ready to respond to outbreaks and to situations where other staff are required to self-isolate. According to the release, that has been difficult due to the need to support third-party providers.

So far, the SHA has identified 117 staff members who can be redeployed for that purpose. That’s over and above the staff who already have been moved to outbreak settings, such as the Parkside Extendicare long-term care home in Regina.

The SHA said it’s also starting other measures to strengthen its ability to respond, including:

• 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.

“The key now is not to let our foot off the gas,” Livingstone said. “People may be encouraged by the vaccine rollout, as they should be, but the reality is that fatalities and hospitalizations lag behind high case counts, meaning it’s critical we still prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

“We still need the public to help us protect those who are vulnerable and protect our health system from being overwhelmed.”