‘It’s a crisis:’ CHEO president on staff shortage between hospitals, COVID-19 testing sites
Posted Sep 17, 2020 03:23:00 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
CHEO President and CEO Alex Munter is worried that if COVID-19 case numbers continue to rise in Ottawa, there just won't be enough staff to go around and hospital care will again need to be cancelled in order to increase testing capacity.
“We could quickly open [the Brewer Arena COVID-19 Assessent Centre] in March because operating rooms and clinics had been shut down,” he explains via Twitter, Thursday. “Staff were reassigned here. Now they have to go back as we have massive backlogs of care: kids waiting months or years for much-needed medical care.”
“It's a crisis,” says Munter.
The CHEO CEO explains staff at the Brewer site has been tripled, but they still need more help.
“We will continue to expand testing and continue to hire more people, including highly-skilled nursing and paramedic students. But we will soon run out of people,” adds Munter. “If this current COVID-19 surge escalates, we'll once again face the prospect of cancelling care to increase testing.”
He says that will only be the case if acute care hospitals are expected to deliver the vast bulk of testing, which is not the case in all other places, but has so far been the case in Ottawa.
The CHEO president is calling for Ottawans to again flatten the curve by washing their hands, wearing masks and physical distancing.
“We can flatten the curve — we've done it before.”
Munter is also advocating for the government to put kids health front and centre in its COVID-19 recovery plan. Right now, the CEO says wait times for kids to have surgery at CHEO are two-and-a-half years, it's 18 months for developmental therapies and more than a year for specialized mental health care.
A 'Kids In Crisis' emergency town hall is being held online Thursday evening.
