Saskatchewan Health Officials Consider Next Stage of COVID-19 Triage | The Canadian News

REGINA – The Saskatchewan Health Authority said Friday it could activate the next stage of its triage plan as COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to overwhelm the health care system.

Derek Miller, the authority’s chief of emergency operations, said a committee made up of doctors and ethicists is ready to prepare a formal recommendation to move on to the second stage of triage.

The province has been operating under the first stage for several months, which has involved canceling surgeries to free up space in beds and for health workers to focus on COVID cases.

The second stage is for doctors to consult with ethicists about who and who does not receive life-saving care.

“It is absolutely shocking, and there is no other way to describe the direction Saskatchewan is headed,” said Dr. Katharine Smart, president of the Canadian Medical Association, from her home in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Officials at the province’s emergency operations center did not comment when triage could begin.

Data from the health authority this month shows that Saskatchewan had the highest number of residents in intensive care units per capita of any province at any point in the pandemic.

Earlier this week, the province released a model showing that hospitalizations are likely to increase through December, unless restrictions are reintroduced and health care does not return to sustainable levels until March.

As of Friday, there were 308 COVID-19 patients in Saskatchewan hospitals, 80 of them in intensive care. There were 3,135 active infections.

“The reason we continue to fight, and why our ICUs are not going to get relief in a sustainable way is because we don’t have additional public health measures,” said Dr. Alexander Wong, infectious disease physician at Regina. .

“Until those public health measures are in place, unfortunately, this is going to drag on.”

A government spokesman for the Saskatchewan Party said no further action is being considered at this time.

The province has a mask mandate and a vaccine test or negative test policy for theaters, event and entertainment venues, restaurants, bars, and nightclubs.

However, Dr. Saqib Shahab, the province’s director of medical health, said those measures do not go far enough.

“What I’m recommending, and the government needs to take that into account: enforcing (the vaccine policy) in all settings,” including places of worship and other gatherings, Shahab said.

Shahab said vaccines are not enough to have an effect on the province’s fourth wave and more measures are needed to reduce transmission and hospitalizations.

“What we’re seeing is something we’ve never seen before and that is… cases are popping up in almost every small community in Saskatchewan,” he said.

The federal government is expected to send healthcare workers to Saskatchewan next week and the province has already transferred some COVID-19 patients to Ontario.

Wong said it doesn’t make sense for Saskatchewan to be removing patients from its jurisdiction without imposing collection limits.

The smart add-on healthcare workers in Saskatchewan are exhausted and that will have a lasting impact on the system.

He said he is concerned about his moral injuries – the psychological anguish of having to choose who lives and who dies during triage.

Saskatchewan doctors have been warning about this since August. This is not news, this did not surprise anyone, “said Smart.

“They are dealing with this level of arrogance that is difficult to understand… particularly when your job as a leader is to keep people safe and protect the population.

“For whatever reason, the Sask Party (government) has completely abdicated that responsibility.”

This Canadian Press report was first published on October 22, 2021.

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