Short-term care: Quebec professional orders will remain vigilant

 Short-term care: Quebec professional orders “will remain vigilant”

Short-term care: Quebec professional orders will remain vigilant

The professional orders of doctors, nurses and pharmacists note that the health network has reached a “saturation point”.

 Stephane Bordeleau

2022-01-20 | Updated yesterday at 7:35 a.m.

Following the publication by Quebec of a new intervention plan which redefines the priority of short-term hospitalizations to deal with the influx of patients with COVID-19, the professional orders of doctors, nurses and pharmacists insist to say that they "will remain vigilant" in this "exceptional situation" of the "next 4 to 6 weeks".

In a joint press release published on Wednesday, the three professional orders make the same observation as the government on the current state of saturation of hospitals by the Omicron wave.

The forecasts for the number of hospitalized patients, both in care units and in intensive care, confirm that the capacities of the health network have reached a saturation point. The usual resources for certain treatments are no longer available.

“Because of this lack of human and material resources, it is necessary in particular to prioritize urgent and vital situations, to question the relevance of hospitalization or to treat patients outside the hospital who do not need the technical platform. »

— A quote from Excerpt from the joint opinion published by the professional orders of doctors, nurses and pharmacists

Recall that on Tuesday, health officials, including Assistant Deputy Minister Lucie Opatrny, presented a new intervention plan already partially deployed. In particular, it plans to reduce hospitalizations by treating as many patients as possible externally or at home, to allow relatives and families to come and help the sick more in the hospital and, above all, to redefine the quality of minimum care for the sick. hospitalized for a short time.

According to a formula set out by Dr. Opatrny, it would be a question of providing quality B care to all patients rather than offering quality A+ care to only some of them.