Local hospitals concerned about capacity with the presence of Omicron

The COVID-19 Omicron variant has local hospitals concerned about ICU and bed capacity to treat patients.

All three local hospital administrators spoke at Friday's COVID-19 community update. 

Lee Fairclough is the president of St. Mary's General Hospital and said the difference between the Omicron variant and the Delta variant is its transmissibility. 

“If we have so many more daily cases in the community, a portion that will require hospitalization will proportionately increase. As a health system, we are working together to prepare our response across the region so we can serve you in the community. We are pulling all of our previous mechanisms together to respond, work across sectors together as hospitals to support the demands of care we will experience in this region,” she said. 

Fairclough said the hospital has added 44 more beds throughout this pandemic and the hospital is a third larger than it was at the start at the pandemic.

“Though all of us have increased our capacity through this period of COVID, almost all of our beds both ICU and acute beds are in use almost 100 per cent of the time at the moment with many people waiting to be admitted in our emergency departments. The demand and need for care is higher. We are also pushing hard to address the backlogs in care that we have seen,” she said. “We know that people are waiting and we are addressing the more urgent presentation of patients in our EDs requiring those procedures now. We are doing all we can.” 

She adds that continuing to ask staff to take on more and more shifts is even tougher for administrators to do.

“They do but how long can we ask them?” she asked. “As can be expected they too are weary and they are braced to accept the very significant wave that is upon us now. We're all troubled at the potential of deferring care further knowing the impacts to people's lives.” 

Bonnie Camm is the Executive Vice President of Clinical Services at Grand River Hospital and she said the healthcare system is very stretched right now with the increase amount of COVID patients the hospital is dealing with. 

Grand River Hospital said its emergency room is built to deal with around 170 patients on average in the emergency department each day and right now the hospital is dealing with around 220 on average per day as of November.

“We will be looking at how we support the priorities as outlined by Ontario health including focusing on our urgent and emergent care and vaccines.”

Patrick Gaskin, president of Cambridge Memorial Hospital, echoes the concern that each administrator shared Friday afternoon, knowing what potentially awaits local hospitals.

“Right now we have less than five COVID patients but we have less than 10 beds available for our community to support COVID patients. We only have three available in ICU right now.” 

Camm adds GRH will be reviewing its operations to support the effort with some potential changes coming in the future to help with the increased pressures that Omicron brings.

She said the staff are very fatigued among the workforce but speaks highly of staff members for working extra hours and taking care of the community through the pandemic. 

Gaskin said it's up to the healthcare system to try and minimize the impact of the Omicron variant in our community and it will take an effort across the system to do that.  

He adds staff at CMH are ready to support the community through what he calls “the hardest wave yet is about to hit us.”