Thread by @KingstonHSC

IMPORTANT: As hospitals continue to navigate a surge of children experiencing respiratory illness from COVID, RSV & Influenza, KHSC is stepping up to support Ontario’s health-care system. KHSC has recently received 10 pediatric patient transfers from across the province. 🧵👇

As we did in 2021, when we accepted over 150 COVID patients from the GTA, we are again proving that we are a critical resource for the Ontario health-care system. KHSC is one of the few hospitals in Ontario with a full pediatric program, including a Pediatric ICU (PICU). 2/9

We will to our best to ensure that the children who need it, will get the highest quality of care here in Kingston, regardless of where they live. At the same time, we are seeing an increase of demand for pediatric care here in #ygk and southeastern Ontario. 3/9

We have been seeing record volumes at the Children’s Outpatient Clinic (COPC) at our HDH site, about 85% of which is related to respiratory illness. Throughout September we saw an average of about 250 children per week at COPC & last two weeks we have seen more than 320. 4/9

Meanwhile in our inpatient pediatric unit we have seen a lot of children hospitalized from RSV and our PICU is also running at 125% capacity. We will continue to work to flex space and staffing resources to accommodate this growing pediatric surge in the coming weeks. 5/9

We also continue to see large volumes of adult patients in our Emergency Department and across our other programs, while navigating the ongoing Canadian shortage of health-care workers. For those that require less urgent care we ask you visit rightplacerightcare.ca 6/9

The credit for our success can really go to our front-line care teams and leaders who go above and beyond to meet the needs of our community on a daily basis, as well as ensuring we can play a role provincially to support surges in patient needs. 7/9

Our advice for this growing wave of respiratory illness – please consider masking again in public spaces, isolate children if they are not feeling well, make sure you & your children are vaccinated against COVID-19 + influenza, practice good hand hygiene/physical distancing. 8/9

For parents are looking for more info about how to care for children with respiratory illnesses, read the following tips from the @OntarioCollege, which has been endorsed by @FLA_OHT flaoht.ca/_files/ugd/f9b… END