COVID-19: Dire warning from Dix as B.C. reports record caseload | Canada News Media
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COVID-19: Dire warning from Dix as B.C. reports record caseload

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Health minister Dix says COVID-19 will be around for “months and months and months and months and months to come.”

Health Minister Adrian Dix warned British Columbians on Monday that COVID-19 would be around for “months and months and months and months and months,” as the daily caseload record was smashed two days in a row.

Earlier, deputy provincial health officer Dr. Réka Gustafson reported 1,120 new cases of COVID-19 over the previous three days, and six deaths. Of those cases, 47 were children aged under 10.

There were 352 cases reported between noon Friday and noon Saturday, 389 between noon Saturday and noon Sunday, and 379 between noon Sunday and noon Monday. The previous one-day record was 317 reported on Oct. 24.

“Our desire to be together, our desire to party together, can sometimes be our greatest weakness in a time of pandemic. Those connections that we count on, our need to come together, are the things that COVID-19 seeks to spread,” said Dix, adding the COVID-19 tide was rising. “You see that all around the world, where we are in a significant new phase of the pandemic. And we must now act to respond to what COVID-19 is doing in our province, to get our own house in order for the cold weather ahead.

“We’re facing COVID-19 for a long time to come. For months and months and months and months and months and months and months to come. We’re going to be dealing with COVID-19 and for us to do all the things that we want, to have children in school, to have surgeries performed, to have businesses operating, to have some normalcy in these extraordinary times in our lives, we need to follow public health guidance and public health advice.”

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Gustafson said there were now 2,945 active cases of COVID-19 in B.C., of which 90 were in hospital, including 19 in intensive care. She said that while those numbers were very concerning, hospitalizations were stable.

Of the new cases, the majority (830) were in the Fraser Health region, with 234 reported in the Vancouver Coastal Health region.

There have been 15,501 cases of COVID-19 reported since the first case appeared in B.C. in late January and 269 deaths.

Gustafson said there were 6,448 people in self-isolation after potentially being exposed to the disease.

There are 28 active outbreaks in health-care facilities, including three reported over the weekend. Of these, 26 are in long-term care facilities and two in acute-care settings. So far, 457 health-care workers at long-term care facilities have contracted the virus. All six people who died over the weekend were in long-term care.

Late on Monday, Fraser Health reported a community outbreak at Capella Dance Academy in Chilliwack where 26 people have tested COVID positive. The facility closed on Oct. 28 and is subject to inspection.

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Dix said there were 24,771 COVID-19 tests performed over the weekend and over 5,000 calls were made to the 811 COVID-19 helpline — and the Ministry of Health was hiring more COVID-19 contact tracers.

Gustafson said more detailed information on where COVID-19 cases had appeared would be available soon.

She said her office was still resisting adopting the federal government’s COVID Alert smartphone app but the office was looking for online tools that would be more helpful. She said the app couldn’t provide meaningful information — like when the exposure occurred and for how long — and needed to be improved.

dcarrigg@postmedia.com

 

Source: – Standard Freeholder

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Older patients, non-English speakers more likely to be harmed in hospital: report

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Patients who are older, don’t speak English, and don’t have a high school education are more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay in Canada, according to new research.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information measured preventableharmful events from 2023 to 2024, such as bed sores and medication errors,experienced by patients who received acute care in hospital.

The research published Thursday shows patients who don’t speak English or French are 30 per cent more likely to experience harm. Patients without a high school education are 20 per cent more likely to endure harm compared to those with higher education levels.

The report also found that patients 85 and older are five times more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay compared to those under 20.

“The goal of this report is to get folks thinking about equity as being a key dimension of the patient safety effort within a hospital,” says Dana Riley, an author of the report and a program lead on CIHI’s population health team.

When a health-care provider and a patient don’t speak the same language, that can result in the administration of a wrong test or procedure, research shows. Similarly, Riley says a lower level of education is associated with a lower level of health literacy, which can result in increased vulnerability to communication errors.

“It’s fairly costly to the patient and it’s costly to the system,” says Riley, noting the average hospital stay for a patient who experiences harm is four times more expensive than the cost of a hospital stay without a harmful event – $42,558 compared to $9,072.

“I think there are a variety of different reasons why we might start to think about patient safety, think about equity, as key interconnected dimensions of health-care quality,” says Riley.

The analysis doesn’t include data on racialized patients because Riley says pan-Canadian data was not available for their research. Data from Quebec and some mental health patients was also excluded due to differences in data collection.

Efforts to reduce patient injuries at one Ontario hospital network appears to have resulted in less harm. Patient falls at Mackenzie Health causing injury are down 40 per cent, pressure injuries have decreased 51 per cent, and central line-associated bloodstream infections, such as IV therapy, have been reduced 34 per cent.

The hospital created a “zero harm” plan in 2019 to reduce errors after a hospital survey revealed low safety scores. They integrated principles used in aviation and nuclear industries, which prioritize safety in complex high-risk environments.

“The premise is first driven by a cultural shift where people feel comfortable actually calling out these events,” says Mackenzie Health President and Chief Executive Officer Altaf Stationwala.

They introduced harm reduction training and daily meetings to discuss risks in the hospital. Mackenzie partnered with virtual interpreters that speak 240 languages and understand medical jargon. Geriatric care nurses serve the nearly 70 per cent of patients over the age of 75, and staff are encouraged to communicate as frequently as possible, and in plain language, says Stationwala.

“What we do in health care is we take control away from patients and families, and what we know is we need to empower patients and families and that ultimately results in better health care.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Alberta to launch new primary care agency by next month in health overhaul

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CALGARY – Alberta’s health minister says a new agency responsible for primary health care should be up and running by next month.

Adriana LaGrange says Primary Care Alberta will work to improve Albertans’ access to primary care providers like family doctors or nurse practitioners, create new models of primary care and increase access to after-hours care through virtual means.

Her announcement comes as the provincial government continues to divide Alberta Health Services into four new agencies.

LaGrange says Alberta Health Services hasn’t been able to focus on primary health care, and has been missing system oversight.

The Alberta government’s dismantling of the health agency is expected to include two more organizations responsible for hospital care and continuing care.

Another new agency, Recovery Alberta, recently took over the mental health and addictions portfolio of Alberta Health Services.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 15, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Experts urge streamlined, more compassionate miscarriage care in Canada

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Rana Van Tuyl was about 12 weeks pregnant when she got devastating news at her ultrasound appointment in December 2020.

Her fetus’s heartbeat had stopped.

“We were both shattered,” says Van Tuyl, who lives in Nanaimo, B.C., with her partner. Her doctor said she could surgically or medically pass the pregnancy and she chose the medical option, a combination of two drugs taken at home.

“That was the last I heard from our maternity physician, with no further followup,” she says.

But complications followed. She bled for a month and required a surgical procedure to remove pregnancy tissue her body had retained.

Looking back, Van Tuyl says she wishes she had followup care and mental health support as the couple grieved.

Her story is not an anomaly. Miscarriages affect one in five pregnancies in Canada, yet there is often a disconnect between the medical view of early pregnancy loss as something that is easily managed and the reality of the patients’ own traumatizing experiences, according to a paper published Tuesday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

An accompanying editorial says it’s time to invest in early pregnancy assessment clinics that can provide proper care during and after a miscarriage, which can have devastating effects.

The editorial and a review of medical literature on early pregnancy loss say patients seeking help in emergency departments often receive “suboptimal” care. Non-critical miscarriage cases drop to the bottom of the triage list, resulting in longer wait times that make patients feel like they are “wasting” health-care providers’ time. Many of those patients are discharged without a followup plan, the editorial says.

But not all miscarriages need to be treated in the emergency room, says Dr. Modupe Tunde-Byass, one of the authors of the literature review and an obstetrician/gynecologist at Toronto’s North York General Hospital.

She says patients should be referred to early pregnancy assessment clinics, which provide compassionate care that accounts for the psychological impact of pregnancy loss – including grief, guilt, anxiety and post-traumatic stress.

But while North York General Hospital and a patchwork of other health-care providers in the country have clinics dedicated to miscarriage care, Tunde-Byass says that’s not widely adopted – and it should be.

She’s been thinking about this gap in the Canadian health-care system for a long time, ever since her medical training almost four decades ago in the United Kingdom, where she says early pregnancy assessment centres are common.

“One of the things that we did at North York was to have a clinic to provide care for our patients, and also to try to bridge that gap,” says Tunde-Byass.

Provincial agency Health Quality Ontario acknowledged in 2019 the need for these services in a list of ways to better manage early pregnancy complications and loss.

“Five years on, little if any progress has been made toward achieving this goal,” Dr. Catherine Varner, an emergency physician, wrote in the CMAJ editorial. “Early pregnancy assessment services remain a pipe dream for many, especially in rural Canada.”

The quality standard released in Ontario did, however, prompt a registered nurse to apply for funding to open an early pregnancy assessment clinic at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton in 2021.

Jessica Desjardins says that after taking patient referrals from the hospital’s emergency room, the team quickly realized that they would need a bigger space and more people to provide care. The clinic now operates five days a week.

“We’ve been often hearing from our patients that early pregnancy loss and experiencing early pregnancy complications is a really confusing, overwhelming, isolating time for them, and (it) often felt really difficult to know where to go for care and where to get comprehensive, well-rounded care,” she says.

At the Hamilton clinic, Desjardins says patients are brought into a quiet area to talk and make decisions with providers – “not only (from) a physical perspective, but also keeping in mind the psychosocial piece that comes along with loss and the grief that’s a piece of that.”

Ashley Hilliard says attending an early pregnancy assessment clinic at The Ottawa Hospital was the “best case scenario” after the worst case scenario.

In 2020, she was about eight weeks pregnant when her fetus died and she hemorrhaged after taking medication to pass the pregnancy at home.

Shortly after Hilliard was rushed to the emergency room, she was assigned an OB-GYN at an early pregnancy assessment clinic who directed and monitored her care, calling her with blood test results and sending her for ultrasounds when bleeding and cramping persisted.

“That was super helpful to have somebody to go through just that, somebody who does this all the time,” says Hilliard.

“It was really validating.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 15, 2024.

Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.

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