About 65 doctors, nurses and support staff have been driving logging roads and flying into Port Alberni to staff hospitals and clinics and deliver pharmaceuticals for the past week, as Highway 4 remains closed, blocking access to the Island’s west coast.
Island Health’s Max Jajszczok, executive director of the emergency operations centre for the Port Alberni and Tofino region, said the health authority launched its command centre June 6, as soon as it learned of the Cameron Bluffs wildfire.
The first priority was to maintain acute and emergency care at West Coast General Hospital in Port Alberni and Tofino General Hospital.
The health authority put out “a call to action” across all of its sites and programs, asking individuals to volunteer to be redeployed, “and we had a significant response,” said Jajszczok.
Health-care workers were also needed for home care, home support and mental health and substance-use programs.
Island Health says about 65 individuals have been back and forth since Tuesday, taking chartered flights between Qualicum Beach and Port Alberni, with others opting to drive a four-hour detour route via Lake Cowichan, which involves travelling on a gravel road.
Jajszczok said flights carrying health-care workers are travelling in and out of Port Alberni twice a day. Some doctors who are helping in the effort are flying back and forth daily.
“We’ve really set ourselves up with a great logistical foundation, and through our call to action, to be able to sustain services and maintain services for all those communities impacted,” he said.
Island Health said about six non-urgent patients have been flown out through B.C. Emergency Health Services — similar numbers to other weeks, said Jajszczok.
For emergency transfers, ambulances can also use an alternate logging road that’s available only for emergencies.
The area was already understaffed because of a national shortage of health-care workers, but the highway created another challenge — health-care workers who live outside Port Alberni on the other side of the highway barrier were unable to get to work because of the road closure.
Last month, the health authority issued an urgent request for physicians to pick up unfilled emergency department shifts throughout the summer, but with the additional help during the wildfire, “we are staffing above what our traditional baselines are within our hospitals,” said Jajszczok.
He said doctors and nurses filling shifts in Port Alberni aren’t leaving gaps in care at Victoria-area hospitals. “There’s definitely a bit of a perception of that, but it’s not necessarily the case.”
In some cases, the physicians helping out could be emergency-room doctors currently working in other areas who want to maintain their ER skills, for example, he said.
“And we’re also ensuring that for those physicians that do come forward, that we try our best to have those conversations around how we can help minimize any impacts to the services that they provide,” said Jajszczok.
The health authority urged patients in the area not to delay if they need to call 911 or go to one of the two hospitals for urgent medical attention.
“We really want people to be able to come in and continue to access service and feel that they can, regardless if we’re having additional challenges with logistics or looking at alternative means of staffing,” Jajszczok said. “We’re here, we’re open and we’re staffed.”
One Port Alberni physician, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, agreed that patients should not hesitate to seek urgent care at West Coast General Hospital, but said the hospital is “grossly understaffed and grossly under-resourced.”
For years, the hospital, for example, has been without a “doctor of the day.”
The doctor of the day is similar to a hospitalist, a family doctor who works out of a hospital and cares for patients who don’t have a family physician and end up in hospital. (Family physicians in Port Alberni have hospital privileges to visit their own registered patients.)
“It’s like we’re trying to fly a plane and you’ve got just bare minimum staff — and sometimes less than minimum staff — but what else can you do, the plane is in the air, you can’t crash the plane, right?” said the Port Alberni doctor.
“So that’s what it feels like here, you can’t collapse or close a hospital on the other side of a forest fire.”
Despite the shortage, everyone from health-care workers and support staff to doctors and nurses and agency nurses being sent in is doing what they can to help, said the Port Alberni doctor.
“There’s a palpable feeling of disarray and dismay, but people are here because they are truly trying to help and truly trying to do their best.”
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