1,000 hospital staff isolating; patient transfers double

Hamilton Health Sciences plans to go ahead with firing unvaccinated personnel

Ten patients have been sent out of the region as the staffing crisis at Hamilton’s hospitals reached new heights with more than 1,000 workers self-isolating.

At the same time, COVID-19 hospitalizations continued to rise to 309 on Monday, with 38 of those in the intensive care unit (ICU).

St. Joseph’s Healthcare warned its ICU was full and that half of critically ill patients were infected with the virus.

Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) was closing its West End Urgent Care Clinic on Main Street West on Monday at 10 p.m. for up to eight weeks so it can redeploy the staff.

St. Joseph’s Healthcare was reducing the hours at its King Campus urgent care centre to 4 to 10 p.m. daily starting Tuesday.

“This measure is necessary to help maintain essential and critical services,” Dr. Greg Rutledge, chief of emergency medicine at St. Joseph’s said in a statement. “Our urgent care team members have a unique set of skills needed to help address critical staffing shortages and high demand for care at our Charlton inpatient site.”

Despite no sign of Omicron peaking at area hospitals yet, HHS plans to go ahead with firing unvaccinated workers on Jan. 26.

So far, vaccine mandates haven’t been a factor as St. Joseph’s hasn’t terminated any staff and HHS has fired 16 as of Monday.

Instead, absenteeism has been the critical issue with 762 staff at HHS self-isolating Monday and 270 more at St. Joseph’s Healthcare for a total of 1,032. The number was up from 888 on Friday.

However, HHS has 212 staff at risk of losing their jobs next week after five or fewer were given medical exemptions for the COVID vaccine. It’s a fraction of their 13,431 staff.

It’s unknown how many of those

at risk of being fired are healthcare workers or already on unrelated leaves.

“HHS remains committed to our COVID vaccination management policy,” the hospital network said in a statement Monday. “Vaccines are an important measure in our collective fight against the pandemic.”

A petition has been started on Change.org for two unvaccinated registered nurses (RN) on an inpatient surgical unit at McMaster Children’s Hospital. It had 300 signatures on Monday.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged our workforce,” stated the petition. “It is a challenge to deliver safe care with current staffing, losing two RNs unnecessarily will (exacerbate) this situation.”

St. Joseph’s has 59 staff at risk of being fired out of a workforce of 5,838. But terminations were still weeks away.

The issue has split the profession, with union the Ontario Nurses’ Association putting out a policy statement in the fall that it doesn’t support “penalizing and terminating nurses when we need them the most.”

At the same time, the professional organization the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario joined a number of groups calling in the fall for provincewide mandatory vaccination of health-care workers.

The difference that vaccination makes has been calculated by the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, which shows vast divides on its dashboard between those with at least two shots and those with none for a number of measures.

Hospital occupancy per one million population as of Monday was 202 for the vaccinated and 1,020 for the unvaccinated.

When it comes to those most severely ill in the ICU, occupancy per one million population was 21 for the vaccinated and 260 for the unvaccinated.

Even cases saw a major difference between the two groups despite two shots providing less protection from infection than three doses. Cases per one million population per day were 517 for those with at least two shots and 992 for those with none.

Ontario’s chief medical officer of health has tied Ontario’s reopening to booster shot uptake, which has slowed recently. Hamilton is trying to kick-start it by allowing anyone age 18plus to walk in without an appointment at the Centre on Barton clinic at1211Barton St. E. Appointments are also available at a number of other city clinics.

Pregnant people and their families can also walk in to almost any Hamilton vaccine clinic without an appointment after McMaster Children’s raised awareness on Jan. 5 about a “disturbing” trend of babies with unvaccinated mothers being admitted to hospitals in Hamilton and Ottawa.

Hamilton’s hospitals have struggled during the fifth wave with record numbers of active COVID outbreaks at one time.

HHS alone had 12 ongoing Monday, although only 11 were counted among city data because one of the outbreaks was at West Lincoln Memorial Hospital in Grimsby. The outbreaks counted by the city involved 161 infections.

St. Joseph’s had five active outbreaks, accounting for 47 cases.

The outbreaks along with the absenteeism and the rising COVID hospitalizations has resulted in 10 patients being transferred out of the region — double from five on Friday.

It’s unknown what Ontario West hospitals sent the patients away or how far they went. But it’s a measure of the increasing strain on hospitals in Hamilton, Burlington, Niagara, Brant, Haldimand and Norfolk. Normally they avoid residents leaving Ontario West by spreading out the load between them.

Hospitals were not the only sector of the health-care system feeling Omicron’s pressure.

The city reported 97 active outbreaks Monday, including 41 in seniors’ homes. The city’s largest outbreak was at Heritage Green Nursing Home in Stoney Creek, where 85 have been infected.

There was also a large outbreak at the Wellington Nursing Home on the central Mountain, where 63 have tested positive.

Another large outbreak was at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre, which was up to 73 cases Monday. There was also an outbreak at Arrell Youth Centre.

Group homes, assisted and communal living accounted for 27 of the outbreaks, while shelters were another nine.

There was also an outbreak at a rehabilitation centre and a hospice.