Staffing shortages that have plagued Ontario emergency rooms and intensive care units have not shuttered those units at Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH).
The Barrie hospital’s ER and ICU remained open on the civic holiday weekend, said Dr. Jeff Tyberg, RVH's chief of staff and vice-president of academic and medical affairs.
“That is not to say, however, there are not significant stresses on these areas as a result of staffing and high patient volumes,” he told BarrieToday. “Certainly at RVH we’re not immune to some of the health-human resource challenges that are going on across Ontario and a particular area or challenge is the emergency department, who have struggled to maintain full staffing.”
Tyberg said RVH’s operating rooms are only for emergency surgeries on a holiday weekend.
He said they had eight operating rooms working on Tuesday, "which is our general summer schedule."
An official with the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU Healthcare, which has approximately 900 members at RVH, declined comment to BarrieToday on Tuesday. SIEU’s members at RVH are nurses, personal service workers and are in dietary, housekeeping and clerical positions.
Last month, unions representing 70,000 hospital workers across Ontario issued open letters to hospital executives and the provincial government for full transparency and staff support to fix what they called the worsening health-human resource crisis leading to widespread hospital emergency room closures and service interruptions.
Tyberg said RVH has strategies in place to keep the ER open and staff it.
“Across the organization, we’ve also put a lot of strategies in place to recruit nurses, to incentivize nurses to work in areas that are particularly tight and as of now I think we’ve managed in the last couple of months to attract more nurses than we’ve lost,” he said.
“A lot of staff and particularly nursing staff, particularly in the emergency department, are quite strained and burned out by two and a half years of COVID and high patient volumes and high acuity, so we certainly have challenges, but we’re working hard to keep our units and our emergency department open," Tyberg added.
Staffing shortages in health care are a regional, provincial and national problem, the doctor said, and that on a regional level RVH is certainly trying to help its partners — other hospitals — when it can and the regional partners try to help RVH when they can as well.
“In the short term, we're trying to continue to make this a workplace of choice to support our front-line nursing staff, with wellness initiatives, with particular financial incentives to help people to get to work in areas that are the most challenges, to move staff around, so these are short-term solutions,” he said. “Medium and longer term, we’re going to need provincial and regional approaches as well.
“We’ll continue to work locally to make this a good positive place to work, to have a positive work culture, to have people help each other out as much as they can and to continue to serve the patients of this city and the region.”
He also stressed RVH’s emergency department remains open.
“If people think they’re suffering from a medical emergency, they should definitely present themselves to the emergency department,” Tyberg said. “If it’s something that they think they can see a primary care physician for, they should do so.
“But our emergency department remains open and certainly ready to care for people who are suffering from medical emergencies. That’s what they’re there for and we will continue to provide safe and quality care for those who need it.”
RVH has 460 physicians, 1,348 registered nurses and registered practical nurses, and another 133 nurses in other roles.
