Ahead of respiratory virus season, the Alberta government announced several ways its preparing hospitals for an expected increase in patients. “Alberta enters this respiratory virus season with 9,003 acute care spaces. That is the largest acute care capacity in our province’s history,” said Premier Danielle Smith. “In the last few years, we’ve permanently opened more than 221 additional hospital spaces across Alberta, including 102 in Edmonton and 79 in Calgary. And we’re preparing another 194 temporary spaces that can be brought into service if demand increases beyond our existing capacity,” added Minister of Hospital and Surgical Health services Adriana LaGrange. Smith says the Alberta Government has been working alongside Acute Care Alberta, alongside other partners, to also streamline administration to improve hospital capacity concerns. This will be done through a new provincial operations centre led by Acute Care Alberta. “Through this program, experienced physicians and nurse practitioners will work within a clinical team to directly in emergency department weight rooms, assess patients earlier, order initial tests and imaging, and begin treatment sooner,” LaGrange said. “It also means patients whose conditions are getting worse can be identified earlier, rather than waiting until they are called into an examination room. These are practical changes that can make a real difference for patients and help support the health care teams that already are working in our emergency departments,” LaGrange continued. When put all together, the hope is the expanded capacity, on top of the new administrative systems meant to streamline the patient and worker experience, takes a significant burden off of frontline workers ad gives them more time to focus purely on helping patients. “We also know that frontline staff should be on the frontline delivering care and not filling spreadsheets every morning. As such, this season we are using an automated data centre that is available across the system to assess daily how many beds are fully staffed and where they are,” said Dr. Sayeh Zielke, Acute Care Alberta CEO. Concerns The announcement brought some concerns from experts in the field about how the government is working to approach respiratory virus season. Dr. Mark Ungrin, a University of Calgary researcher who has dedicated years of research towards respiratory viruses, says he was hoping to see more action taken towards preventive measures. “We all win if fewer people get sick, and if we can keep the health care workers we need to keep the system running healthy in the first place,” Ungrin said. He believes improving ventilation systems in public spaces should be a top priority, adding that would have year round benefits for other seasonal challenges like wildfire smoke. Perhaps more pressingly, he believes N95 masks should be worn in all hospitals, as these are the exact spaces where people are often the most vulnerable or have a higher chance of spreading disease. “The starting point here really has to be: ‘why aren’t we doing more of this in health care facilities?’ Really, the concepts aren’t that complicated, right? If it doesn’t get inside you, it can’t make you sick,” Ungrin said. When asked about masks, Smith said “we certainly would not want to see a mask mandate across the entire province in every circumstance,” but adds hospitals have the authority to make masking mandatory as they see fit. “There are instances throughout respiratory virus season where individual hospitals and individual floors have made decisions to have enhanced protection. We tend to leave those kinds of decisions on a case-by-case basis at the hospital level so that it can be calibrated properly,” Smith said. “We base our decisions at a system level based on the best evidence to provide the best care for our patients. That means using N95s when it’s needed under the specific circumstances, like very contagious airborne diseases where we need to protect our staff so that we limit staffing shortages and sick days,” Zielke added. Ungrin disagrees with the approach, believing reacting to possible outbreaks doesn’t properly mitigate the possible harms that could have been avoided. “The challenge is you’re really closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten out, right? By the time you have an outbreak and you start saying ‘oh, well, we should start putting respirators on people.’ it’s too late. You’ve already got an outbreak, it’s already spread. People have taken it home to their families. Patients may get seriously harmed or even die from it,” Ungrin said. Vaccine Push The previous flu season was the deadliest in Alberta’s recorded history, leading the province to push forward with a vaccine campaign. “We have launched a system that people could have started booking their shots starting October 5. I understand that the vaccine was rolling out October 19, some got it earlier and we did tell them if they wanted to, if they got it earlier, they should be administering it earlier. But we make sure that with our vaccination program, that it is targeted to the most at-risk individuals,” Smith said. LaGrange added the government has also been looking into what specific vaccines are being administered, calling last year’s shots a “mismatch.” “Last year we also knew that there was a mismatch on the vaccine itself. It didn’t really affect the strongest strain which caused most problems, so we’re hoping that this year there is a better match to the vaccines to what we will see in influenza coming forward,” LaGrange said.
