“It speaks to the fact that this wave of the pandemic will be a pandemic of the unvaccinated and young folks because thankfully the majority of older folks in our communities have been vaccinated and are also on route hopefully to get booster shots.”
Meanwhile, the province’s health care system is under serious strain and the story is the same here in the Quinte region.
The COVID-19 pandemic, now one and half years old, has posed unprecedented challenges and the current fourth wave, spurred on by the Delta variant, continues to stress employees at Quinte Health Care’s four hospitals.
Staff is doing its best but are fatigued and staff shortages are a major problem not easily solved.
Vice President and Transformation Officer for QHC, Susan Rowe, outlines the current staffing situation.
“So as of today we have 142 vacancies for employees within the organization that we’re actively trying to recruit for. There’s a mix of full-time, part-time, casual, temporary, permanent kind of positions. Seventy-seven of those vacancies are for nurses.”
Along with the strain of continually dealing with COVID-19, emergency room visits have been higher than usual with people being generally more seriously ill than is normal and staff in operating rooms continue to work overtime trying to clear a backlog of elective surgeries from previous pandemic waves.
