Thunder Bay regional hospital working with province to redirect, transfer patients

Patients have started to be redirected or transferred away from the Thunder Bay regional hospital after a high volume of intensive care unit patients, especially those on ventilators, grew over the weekend.

The Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre initiated the grey level of its COVID-19 response on March 13, with 22 patients in its intensive care unit and 19 of those on ventilators.

Hospital officials on Tuesday morning said there were 45 patients hospitalized who had tested positive for COVID-19, with nine of them in the intensive care unit.

Peter Voros, the hospital's COVID-19 incident management team lead, said decisions about transferring patients are made by the provincial critical care command centre.

"They've been working with our critical care team here in order to make decisions around ensuring that we've got capacity and space and staff to deal with whatever may come our way," he said, adding about five patients from the region have been redirected to hospitals in southern or eastern Ontario.

The command centre is also planning to transfer one or two intensive care unit patients on each of Monday and Tuesday before re-evaluating the hospital's capacity and the COVID-19 situation in Thunder Bay, he added.

1A unit outbreak

The hospital last week declared a COVID-19 outbreak in its 1A medical unit, which has resulted in a pause in new admissions to that area of the facility.

"We haven't had any additional patients or staff positive at this time and so the unit remains an outbreak from a public health perspective," Voros said. 

Voros said the hospital has about 50 ventilators.

The hospital had an overall patient occupancy of about 76 per cent on Tuesday. Elective procedures have been reduced, with a focus on emergent surgeries.

Officials said the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is continuing, with a goal of completing all consenting hospital staff over the next week.