Widespread staffing shortages affecting hospitals across Southwestern Ontario will continue to have an impact on services in Huron and Perth counties as the province’s health-care system grapples with high turnover, officials say.
“We are looking at our recruitment and retention strategies to support our staff, but it will be a challenging summer,” Mary Cardinal, the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance’s chief quality executive, said Tuesday morning.
How challenging?
Well, the group overseeing hospitals in Stratford, St. Marys, Clinton and Seaforth announced its most recent emergency department closure only a few hours later. That service will be unavailable in Clinton for three days beginning on Saturday. The closure follows temporary cutbacks to overnight emergency department hours and labor and delivery services elsewhere in the region over the past few weeks.
Communities in Perth County outside of the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance umbrella are feeling the squeeze as well. In Listowel, for example, the Listowel Wingham Hospitals Alliance has limited obstetrical services as well as reduced the number of beds in its complex continuing care unit.
“We’ll have to make other adjustments to services as we determine what staff we have available through the summer,” said Karl Ellis, the alliance’s chief executive. “The bottom line is, it’s a numbers game. There simply aren’t enough staff to cover the required number of shifts.”
According to a press release from the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance, Ontario Health has asked hospitals across Southwestern Ontario to prepare co-ordinated summer plans that predict staff availability across various programs and services. The goal, officials said, is to identify concerns about service levels and ensure contingency and communications plans are in place.
“Our commitment to providing high quality, safe health-care services will be balanced with the availability of resources and respect for the wellness of our teams,” said Andrew Williams, the hospital group’s president and CEO. “Where service adjustments become unavoidable, often at the last minute due to either unplanned staff absences or high bed occupancy, our commitment is to make sure that all health-care partners and communities are aware. This includes knowing plans that are in place to ensure continued service access through adjacent organizations.”
Although COVID-19 cases have been declining, the impacts of the pandemic on the province’s health-care system are still being felt. In a recent Ontario Hospital Association survey, health-care workers leaving their jobs cited pandemic-related burnout and stress as the main reason behind their decision to find jobs elsewhere.
“A lot of people have left the profession or retired early because of COVID,” Cardinal said. “Hospitals are intense – they’re 24-7 – and that’s a different demand than perhaps a health-care organization that may operate more on a Monday-to-Friday basis.”
Cardinal also pointed out, however, that a human resources crunch was expected to hit Ontario hospitals well before the pandemic.
Over the past four years, more than 4,400 staff have retired from the health-care field with the number of unfilled positions in 2021 increasing 91 per cent from the previous year, according to figures cited by the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance. In an industry where one in five staff members are older than the age of 50, health-care officials expect turnover to remain high.
The impacts will be felt disproportionately at smaller hospitals.
“You can have a situation where one person is off for whatever reason and that impacts the whole service,” Ellis said. “When you’ve got one lab tech working in a lab for the weekend and they are off sick or unable to work, then it stresses your lab for the whole period.”
Incentive programs offered by the province to encourage people to train for careers in health care are a good start, Cardinal added, but right now hospitals are all scrambling to recruit from a “very lean pool” of candidates.
Training will also take time.
“I think it behooves us to just really look at how we, as a province, provide health care,” Cardinal said. “There are no easy solutions.”