By Mike Renzella
The Haldimand Press
HALDIMAND/NORFOLK—Nurses have always played a critical role in the health of a community, and their services have never been more needed than right now as local hospitals continue to feel the impact of the third wave of COVID-19.
To celebrate National Nursing Week this year, we wanted to shine a light on exactly what the nurses and health care teams of Haldimand and Norfolk are doing in our local hospitals, working together as a team, and a family, to fight COVID-19.
Kim Mullins, Vice President of Patient Care and Chief Nursing Officer at Norfolk General Hospital (NGH) and West Haldimand General Hospital (WHGH) spoke about some of the challenges facing her nursing staff at both locations.
“Our staff are tired, along with everyone in the community. I think in particular clinical staff are feeling really tired and concerned, especially in this last third wave,” she said. “It’s been a long haul with constant changes and this particular wave is a lot more concerning and the pressures have gotten a lot closer to our community hospitals than they ever did in wave one and wave two.”
Haldimand itself has no ICU beds. Norfolk General is traditionally labelled a level two ICU, with six beds available, but have expanded to eight beds at the Province’s direction. In terms of patients on ventilators, staff at NGH typically prepare for up to two patients at a time, but are currently trained to handle six, with planning in place to up the amount of ICU beds to 11 if needed.
Handling that extra demand requires additional staff, ample practice revolving around surge plans, planning ways staff can quickly ramp up operations as needed, and ensuring that emergency and ICU areas have adequate equipment and supplies.
“We’ve done some drills where we practise team-based modelling in the ICU and that’s gone really well. It’s stressful for the teams, but it’s helped them to understand that if things were to rapidly progress, what would that change look like in the ICU,” explained Mullins.
Some examples of progress that have come out of team collaboration exercises include the implementation of crisis documentation, a process for inputting medical data that bypasses many of the redundancies involved in the normal data input process, as well as bringing nurses down from other departments to orientate them to the ICU in the event that they are called to work there.
“We’re seeing that collaboration between nursing departments and they were really proud to show off their skills as critical care nurses,” said Mullins on the camaraderie she is witnessing in her departments.
The ICU at NGH is currently sitting at around 80% capacity and has generally hovered around 80 to 90% as of late. While this might sound high, Mullins said, “We’ve been really fortunate.”
Ensuring extra capacity requirements are met in the ICU and emergency departments at NGH and WHGH is not the only role nursing staff plays. They also act as important liaisons with the public, interacting with family members of sick patients and helping them to understand the care their loved ones are receiving.
“That emotional aspect, when families are not there with their loved ones, there’s a heightened level of anxiety. They’ve had to work extra hard to let people know that we’re taking care of their loved one, they’re in good hands,” explained Mullins. “Telling them that their loved ones are comfortable and resting is more important than telling them what their vital signs are.”
WHGH and NGH work with a shared leadership team. Mullins and her peers lead both teams.
They’ve worked hard to ensure patients at WHGH have access to the ICU at NGH: “If they have a patient in their emergency department there, it’s just a quick call over to Norfolk. We’ve really built that collaboration to take those patients.”
She continued, “West Haldimand has done a phenomenal job. They saw the first impact of COVID-19 while they were supporting Anson Place. They had to rapidly adjust.”
In addition to having the option to send patients to Norfolk, WHGH also has a working collaboration with Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington and can rapidly arrange for patients to be transferred there for additional help when required, as was the case for 45-year-old chicken farmer Mike VanNetten of Simcoe, as reported last week.
“We’re also supporting our First Nations communities as well,” said Mullins. “I know the nurses are asking every day for the numbers on Six Nations and the Mississaugas of the Credit because we’re so close and they know they want to be there to support them any way they can.”
Over at Haldimand War Memorial Hospital (HWMH) in Dunnville, there are currently no COVID positive patients enrolled: “We have arrangements with Niagara Health and other local hospitals to assist us with our COVID positive admitted patients as needed,” said Sharon Moore, President and CEO of HWMH and Edgewater Gardens.
Moore touched on how HWMH determines their ability to take in patients from other hot spot areas in the province, should the need arise: “HWMH is part of a regional bed capacity planning group and we monitor our bed capacity several times throughout the day…. HWMH, like all Ontario hospitals, is a provincial resource and we will support patients as needed.”
Although there may be no COVID patients currently admitted in the hospital, the regimen of following COVID guidelines and restrictions has taken a toll: “Health care workers are under a lot of stress. We continue to support one another as best we can. Hearing positive comments from our community helps a great deal,” said Moore.
The reasons why National Nursing Week is more important than ever this year are obvious: these people who have worked tirelessly to help those worst afflicted by this pandemic deserve all the praise we can heap on them and more.
Mullins summed up the current moment our health care professionals are caught in: “Our staff are extremely dedicated and provide exceptional care. They just keep digging deep. But we’re starting to see the pressures of that.”
