Health authority starting process of moving patients in city hospitals to rural areas

The Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) is working through its plans to manage the increased demands on hospitals due to Omicron, and part of that is moving patients around.

Derek Miller, interim chief operating officer of the SHA, said the level of COVID-19 in the province’s hospitals is “significant” and is having an impact. Hospitalizations are continuing to rise in the province.

“Within our teams, we are working to manage those while at the same time trying to minimize the impact on non-COVID services, surgeries and other day-to-day health services that Saskatchewan residents rely on us for,” Miller told reporters Wednesday.

On Thursday, there were 328 people in hospital and 35 in ICU with COVID. Of those, 148 patients were admitted for reasons directly related to the virus.

As the health minister had explained earlier in the week, Miller said some areas are experiencing higher levels of demand, so the authority was implementing a transfer of “low acuity patients.”

“This allows us to ensure that we have capacity in all of our sites to manage through the Omicron wave. And it also helps us avoid any potential service slowdowns that might have to happen if we were to need to build additional capacity,” explained Miller.

Miller said the SHA is specifically working through the process in Saskatoon and is looking at it in other larger centres that were at or above their hospital capacity.

On Thursday, Health Minister Paul Merriman said he’d been told the process is starting, though the SHA on Thursday couldn’t confirm whether any patients had been moved as part of load levelling. A spokesperson said dozens of patients are moved every day.

“This is something that’s just started. We’re hoping that we don’t have to do this for very long or very often,” said Merriman.

Miller said load levelling is one of the authority’s key strategies and moving patients from urban centres out to their home communities is always one of their objectives.

After that, Miller explained the next step is finding people who can get an alternate level of care outside of those larger facilities that were over capacity.

“Locally, we do have triggers that are built into each of the hospitals whereby they would — based on a number of different factors, including the occupancy, the number of patients that are waiting to be admitted either from emergency departments or other — take those into consideration and at some point, they would trigger this more proactive and deliberate transferring of patients to those other centres,” said Miller.

Load levelling is part of the stepped surge response to Omicron the province had previously outlined and Miller said there would be an impact to other services as a part of that.

“We are doing our very best to ensure that the current pressures in our hospitals are having as minimal an impact on other services as possible,” said Miller.

Leaders for some rural areas and health-care leaders have said they can’t handle taking patients from cities, but Merriman said while the SHA is co-ordinating that, he and other ministers have spoken to local leaders.

“We understand that there are pressures in specific communities. We’re very cognizant of that and we’re not going to add more pressures into those communities that are stretched. But we are looking at maximizing our health-care system,” said Merriman.