CHMA attended a media conference with the president and CEO of Horizon Health Network, Karen McGrath, on Monday (November 23).
The following is information collected from said conference.
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McGrath says the “entire health system is now on high alert, and our hospitals are closely reviewing their contingency planning.”
As of today, Horizon is not cancelling elective surgeries.
During the pandemic, New Brunswick has not seen an increase of clinical staff, especially nurses.
As of noon on Monday, 64 Horizon staff are self-isolating.
McGrath explains that covering the missing staff involves “redeploy[ing] staff to other areas in the hospital,” which can result in closing other services.
Staffing is determined “hour by hour,” to ensure that critical resources such as the ICU are functioning.
McGrath says that the worker affected in the Stan Cassidy Centre for Rehabilitation did not work in other health care settings.
Less people are going to the emergency room, which McGrath says is a cause for concern.
The decrease is “slight,” but McGrath says that during the first wave of COVID-19, a number of people with “true emergencies” did not come due to COVID-19 concerns.
She says “the next few days and weeks are critical to our health care system, we could easily be overwhelmed with very few new cases.”
She explains that a number of beds are always occupied by people who are not COVID-19 positive, with three to five beds available per facility in the ICU.
For context, Horizon has five regional facilities in New Brunswick.
Therefore “seven or eight people being admitted in a very short time in addition to everybody else…could impact the system, and [they] could be overwhelmed really quickly.”
In the event of the healthcare system being overwhelmed, McGrath says the first thing that would happen is the cancellation of elective surgeries.