Staff are calling hundreds of sick people during the Omicron wave and hospitals are feeling the strain.

One hundred staff members a day communicate with illness at the University of Toronto Health Network hospitals.

More than 150 employees at a London hospital tested positive for the virus.

Four hundred Hamilton Health Sciences staff are in isolation due to exposure to COVID-19.

As Omicron sweeps Ontario, hospitals in the province say they are facing a new kind of challenge: a wave of staff absences that forces them to consider canceling scheduled medical treatments or calling isolated staff to return to work early.

Gillian Howard, a spokeswoman for University Health Network, said this is the case in the greater Toronto area, not just at UHN.

“We are seeing a large number of employees reporting sick, around 100 per day, either from an exposure that needs to be evaluated by the Health Services or because they are sick,” Howard told the Star. “We are currently working with the advice from the Medical Director of Health and Ontario Health in terms of how we will manage through January. “

Howard said the steps they will take will include reallocating staff and reducing scheduled care. UHN has a staff of about 17,200.

Unlike previous COVID waves, it is Omicron’s unprecedented transmissibility, rather than its severity, that is putting pressure on the healthcare system. While hospitals are filling up with more and more COVID-19 patients, there have been proportionally fewer patients needing intensive care compared to previous waves. That means that while there is not yet the same demand for staff to handle large numbers of very sick patients, the large number of potential cases and exposures risks isolating more healthcare workers, where they cannot help.

“Usually we don’t get calls on the weekends, but we had to have all our hands on the deck because we had six or seven COVID-19 cases going into emergency,” said Julia Oosterman, chief of communications for Bluewater Health in Sarnia. . “Starting yesterday we started calling staff during the holidays to see if they could go back to work; it is not a desirable result. They really need and deserve their vacation. “

A total of 89 of the 1,800 Bluewater staff members are currently in isolation, Oosterman said. That is about four times the number of people who are usually sick.

“Due to widespread community transmission of the Omicron variant, the Ontario Hospital Association is actively working on contingency plans with healthcare authorities in an effort to continue essential hospital operations during this wave,” Anthony wrote. Dale, president and CEO of the association. . “Management can only be achieved in the coming months if we continue to act as a single health system.”

The spread of Omicron among hospital staff has led to policy changes in hospital networks and other jurisdictions. The Star reported last week that some nurses in Ontario were being called back to work during periods of isolation. The province of Quebec has said that some COVID-positive health workers will be called back to work, a plan that its health minister, Christian Dubé, called “the best alternative to not providing care.”

Oosterman said he hopes that staffing can be shared between jurisdictions, noting that Bluewater received patients from GTA and Manitoba during the early waves of the pandemic and would help again if it had capacity.

In Quebec City, the main network of hospitals said Sunday it will postpone half of its surgeries and appointments from Wednesday. The announcement came as Quebec faces a surge in cases in hospitals, with more than 1,200 hospitalized with COVID as of Sunday, according to The Canadian Press.

In the UK, where Omicron has been circulating the longest, the situation is similar: the sheer volume of cases creates serious staffing problems in some areas.

“Right now, (the National Health Service) is faced with a possible immediate emergency for which it must prepare. The option could potentially leave patients without treatment or create additional temporary capacity. ”Chris Hopson, CEO of NHS Providers, an association representing healthcare workers, wrote in a Twitter thread on Saturday. “Unlike last January, there are currently far fewer elderly people, seriously ill, who need intensive care… The problem, therefore, less one of the patient’s acuity, the intensity of care and the length of stay required. Plus one of the large volume of patients who need general and acute beds. ”

Dr. Donald Vinh, an infectious disease specialist at McGill University Health Center, says all Canadian provinces are likely to face choices about whether to allow exposed personnel to return to work in the coming days as the number increases. sick people and the number of workers. available to treat them shrinks.

“We are at a fixed and limited number of health workers in each province, because there is no pool or pool of health workers that we can depend on to rescue us here,” he told The Canadian Press last week. .

Rob MacIsaac, chief executive officer of Hamilton Health Sciences, said Friday the hospital is taking “extraordinary steps” to try to fill the staff shortage, including paying premiums to staff who work in their spare time and returning calls to the Asymptomatic personnel isolated after a negative rapid test. result.

“Once again we are faced with immense pressures around hospital occupancy and staffing,” MacIsaac wrote on December 31. statement.

By New Year’s Eve, 152 London Health Sciences Center employees had tested positive for COVID, according to their website.

There are additional stressors on healthcare personnel at this time, even if they are not isolating. When a nurse, administrative assistant, paramedic, or personal support worker comes home from vacation, they sometimes encounter patients who resist their care.

“We are dealing with large groups of unvaccinated people, many of whom do not believe in traditional science,” Oosterman said. “So the tonality within hospitals, the level of speech, has changed significantly since the first wave.”

“It’s really unfortunate because the whole team is exhausted and coming on vacation,” he said. “It’s very different from what it used to be.”

With files from The Canadian Press