ICYMI: Health-care worker shortages, made worse by COVID, are causing emergency rooms to close throughout the country - via healthing_ca healthing health healthnews
Health-care worker shortages, made worse by COVID, are causing emergency rooms to close throughout the country.Communicating the status of emergency rooms is left up to individual hospitals, Ontario Health explained in an email to Healthing. GETTY
The Margaret Cochenour Memorial Hospital in Red Lake, Ontario closed its ER for 24 hours last Saturday, a recent example of aof how burnout and COVID-19 illness is exacerbating pre-existing health care worker shortages. For Dr. Sarah Newbery, a family physician in the community of Marathon and the assistant dean physician of workforce strategy for the northern Ontario School of Medicine, the issue is complex.Physician shortages were already a concern in northern Ontario before the pandemic — but COVID pushed hospital teams to the brink: physicians already tasked with a significant workload were also managing COVID screening centres and vaccination clinics.
“In December of 2020, we needed 86 [physicians] across northern Ontario. Last June, that was up to 97. Now, as last count in December of 2021, we needed 103,” says Newbery. “So the shift, and the decline, in the number of family physicians, living in and working in rural communities across the North has been quite worrisome over the last two years in particular.”
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