Service slowdown needed to deal with rising hospitalizations, SUN president says

The Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN) is calling for a temporary slowdown in healthcare services as its members struggle to keep pace with rising hospitalizations under the Delta-driven fourth wave.

President Tracy Zambory says the union wants to have a discussion with the Saskatchewan Health Authority about dialling back some services to 80 per cent to free up resources for tasks like COVID care, vaccinations and contact tracing.

“We know that the research and evidence show that that reduction to 80 per cent works. And we can find ourselves getting our feet back underneath us,” Zambory said.

“It’s not tenable anymore to have a system that is fully operational.”

During the SHA’s most recent physician town hall, doctors heard that hospitalizations have increased by more than 30 per cent in one week, with ICU admissions rising as well. This comes as the province is experiencing some of the highest new daily case rates among Canadian provinces.

Earlier in the week, the health authority’s CEO Scott Livingstone said service slowdowns, like reducing elective surgeries, represent a tool in the SHA’s pandemic response but not one it plans to use.

“The plan moving forward is we continue on our service resumption as we watch carefully what’s happening with COVID and pressures on the system,” Livingstone said Tuesday.

“We have not taken the system down entirely since April of 2020 and we’ve been targeting service reductions in areas of the province where we see high caseloads. So that’s still part of the strategy for the SHA and our defensive response to the virus.”

The surging case numbers are putting frontline health care workers under increasing strain, Zambory said. She recalled speaking with one SUN member who finished their shift one night, returning the next morning to discover that the caseload had doubled. Those in the north are telling her they are seeing exponential growth in cases.

“We’ve got people coming into the intensive care units that are younger and sicker than ever before and we have a workforce that’s burnt out. So you know we’re finding ourselves in a very precarious situation here in Saskatchewan,” Zambory said.

Zambory said the healthcare system is facing staff shortages and those still working are being stretched thin. She said one in five registered nurses are eligible for retirement and hopes exhaustion doesn’t push them into it.

“People aren’t getting their scheduled days off so they cannot recharge. They’re certainly not getting vacations despite what Minister Merriman had to say about it. That is absolutely not the case. Registered nurses taking vacation is not why we have a system shortfall,” she said.

“They’re tired, they’re despondent and some of them are looking for ways to get out.”

SUN is echoing the call by the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation for mandatory vaccine mandates and Zambory supports the return of public health measures like mandatory masking and reducing crowd sizes.

“Because we’re in trouble here. We’ve got the Delta variant is ravaging this province,” she said.

“For whatever reason, when we thought we were free of COVID, we are not. And I think just saying we need to learn to live with COVID, that’s a wrongheaded view of how we need to manage ourselves here.”