Follow up to my tweet on AB hospitals bursting at the seams....
Staffing. Or lack there of.
Staffing. Or lack there of.
I was supposed to be off hospital administrative duties this week, and as the week as has gone on, it has been increasingly evident that there's no such thing as a break.
Not when, in one fail swoop, we will likely have 5 critical medical staff off for COVID and isolation, with a skeleton back up plan that will barely cover this gap.
At a time where concurrent to the staff shortages, we continue to see patient volumes that are untenable and 50-75% over our bed base.
At a time where we have to ADD teams of docs and allied health to deal with the volume, but cannot even staff our baseline teams.
At a time where I will now need to ask my weary colleagues to consider moving to a system that forces them to work an additional 18-24 hours on top of the 70 hours they work per week, just to cover the gaps.
This is utterly unsustainable. I don't know how we will make it through the next weeks. Like, actually do not know.
So when we talk about the effect of this wave on hospitalizations, please remember this context- that we are starting this wave so severely depleted, that whether we have 10 or 1000 COVID patients, the system is already broken beyond repair.
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