Health Sciences North has taken several steps to protect patients and staff from any further COVID-19 exposure as the result of the three different outbreaks in three separate parts of the hospital that occurred earlier this month.
HSN president and CEO Dominic Giroux outlined some of the measures this week when the HSN Board of Directors held its monthly board meeting. The event was an online teleconference.
In presenting his report to the board, Giroux explained the first outbreak was discovered on March 12 in the South Tower sixth floor, the second outbreak occurred March 13, also in the South Tower fourth floor and the third outbreak occurred on March 15 in the North Tower seventh floor. The first outbreak, which involved three staff members, was declared over on Tuesday, by Public Health Sudbury and Districts.
The second outbreak, which involved two residents, and the third outbreak which involved two staff and four residents, was still active on Thursday.
Giroux told the board that because of the outbreaks, HSN has initiated several short term pandemic priorities.
This includes reducing some surgical activity.
"We are temporarily reducing scheduled activity in the surgical program to reduce in-patient bed demand and to contain the number of admitted patients in the emergency department to less than 15 at midnight.
Giroux said another measure is to temporarily reduce outpatient activity to redeploy staff to a number of areas such as critical care, the emergency department and also acute in-patient care, in response to staff isolation requirements associated with the outbreaks.
He added that the outbreaks limited the hospital's capacity for patient flow into and out of various care units, which he said put added pressure on staffing.
Giroux said that on looking back over the past year, the pandemic put pressure on hospital staff in several ways.
"When you think of a year ago, we were not in the business of doing testing for COVID or processing swabs for COVID. So our location on Regent Street and Walford Road, since the beginning of the pandemic we have tested more than 75,000 residents. And our laboratory team here at HSN has processed more than 273,000 swabs, since the month of May," said Giroux.
He added that when the pandemic began the hospital decided to postpone non-urgent and elective surgeries in anticipation of an upswing of COVID-19 patients. Giroux said things have improved since then.
"We've also continued to make progress in reducing the surgical wait list, pre-COVID, which stood at about 3500 patients across all surgical sub-specialties. It peaked at about 4200 cases in the fall and now it's back to about 3600 patients. I want to acknowledge the support of the Ministry of Health with additional top up funding to allow us to operate at more than 100 per cent," he said.
Giroux added that in the past month, in-house vaccinations against the virus was a priority.
"We have been quite busy in supporting public health in vaccination of our own health care workers but also of high-priority health care workers for other organizations here in the City of Greater Sudbury. So we're at a point now where as of Friday (March 19) about 71 per cent of our team has been offered the vaccine and we expect to have completed that work definitely by mid-April if supplies continue to hold," he said.
Giroux's printed presentation also revealed that 3,127 HSN employees had received their first dose of the vaccine. The report also said hospital 144 employees declined the vaccine.
As he wrapped up his report to the board, Giroux spoke kindly of the hospital staff saying that despite being one year into the pandemic, hospital workers continued to push themselves above and beyond what was expected.
"I am extremely proud of the more than 6,000 employees, medical staff, learners and volunteers that we have," said Giroux. "They are being resilient, they're compassionate, they're kind, they are committed to patients and their families. This is a very long marathon. Our teams are exhausted and you will agree with me, they definitely deserve our admiration and our respect."
Len Gillis is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter at Sudbury.com, covering health care in Northern Ontario. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the federal government.