28
A Year in Review 2012 – 2013:
Programs
Courage Lives Here
29
Medical and Community Care
Courage is...
rising
to the
challenge
Emergency staff come together
to battle the flu
Nurse manager Jill Smirnis remembers the surge of
patients clearly.
They came in by cab and ambulance, lying on stretchers
and in wheelchairs — coughing and sneezing, vomiting
and suffering from diarrhea.
Flu season had hit.
“Families and patients were spilling out into the
hallways, and patients were filling up every single bed
in Emergency,” Smirnis recalled. ”Often it was standing
room only.”
Smirnis works in the Toronto Western Hospital Emergency
Department. She and fellow Emergency staff members
at TWH and Toronto General Hospital were on the front
lines of this year’s flu and stomach infection season
gone wild.
From left to right, emergency care staff Kathy Bates, Patient Care Coordinator, along with
RNs Licinia Simoes and Chai Shi Yee.
(Photo: UHN)
‘Like the Don Valley Parkway’
“It was like the Don Valley Parkway at 4 p.m. on a Friday,
with four lanes reduced to one,” said Kathy Bates, Emer-
gency Patient Care Co-ordinator at the Toronto Western.
“It was a pressure cooker, with constant monitoring to
make sure that every patient remained stable.”
During this time at TWH alone, staff saw an increased
number of patients — up to 184 a day — compared to
around 160 patients a day during non-flu season. At one
point, three patients were intubated simultaneously
with mechanical breathing machines, waiting for ICU
admissions.
Adding to the workload were the extra precautions that
need to be taken during flu season. Staff are required
to thoroughly examine anyone who comes through the
door with flu-like symptoms.
Extra isolation rooms
It can often mean creating extra isolation rooms with
posted signs, leaving carts with supplies outside the
room, and ensuring that everyone going in takes extra
precautions such as donning gowns, gloves, masks and
goggles.
All this, on top of what Emergency sees in a typical 12-
hour shift in the winter: patients with heart attacks, those
with end-stage diseases who are dying, patients who
have slept out in the cold and need to be wrapped in
a “bear hugger” or warming blanket, those with broken
or fractured limbs, some who have ingested too much
alcohol or drugs, and those who are suffering from the
flu and have nowhere to go since physicians’ offices are
closed over the holidays.
(
Continued on page 30...)
Nursing student Devora Byer, left, and nurse practitioner Cathy
Beaudreau, right, of Toronto General Hospital’s Emergency
Department.
(Photo: UHN)
Nurses at Toronto General Hospital and Toronto Western Hospital
were at the front lines of the flu season this year.
(Photo: UHN)
