It’s been a busy couple of years for all health care sectors and the Director of Emergency Services for Hastings County says many staff members are off work right now for a number of reasons.
Doug Socha tells Quinte News that right now it’s really a combination of two years of the COVID-19 pandemic that everybody’s been dealing with.
Socha says, “So all health sectors are certainly tired and really just put to the test again and again. I think it’s really right now like a human health resource issue. Certainly the mental health toll has been really extreme and stressful on everybody. And again it’s not only the working conditions with PPE but, again just constantly responding to calls but we’re seeing the level of acuity of patients increase.”
“There’s certainly lots of staff in the health care sector that are off that are either isolated or working from home. So we’re really just seeing a lot of the pressures where, before we had a lot of capacity and now we’re not seeing that capacity there.”
He added “We’ve got a combination of a number of reasons why staff are off right now. Certainly the mental health toll has been really extreme and stressful on everybody. And again it’s not only the working conditions with PPE but, again just constantly responding to calls but we’re seeing the level of acuity of patients increase.
“Overall our call volume has been increasing this year compared to last year. I think part of that is when we came out of the last wave we saw an exponential increase in the number of emergency calls for the paramedic service. So while there was less calls during sort of those peak phases of COVID, there’s a rebound effect where more and more people are accessing the health care system and we’re starting to see that in the last couple of weeks here where the call volume decreases a little bit but then that’s going to rebound once we come out of this again with that same pattern of people calling again.”
Socha says his message is to assure everybody that the health care system is prepared to look after anybody who is sick.
“So it’s important that if you’re having those critical injuries, or you know, heart attacks, strokes, and those kind of situations where you need to go to the emergency room, we’re certainly open for business and so is the paramedic service.”
