One Sask. ICU patient to return from Ontario, no other transfers planned

A second ICU patient was scheduled to return to Saskatchewan from Ontario on Tuesday.

Saskatchewan health officials have sent 26 patients to Ontario to receive care over the past several weeks. The first one to return to Saskatchewan did so on Friday.

Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency president Marlo Pritchard said during a COVID-19 technical briefing Tuesday that while Ontario made 30 beds available to Saskatchewan at the start of the transfers, no patients are expected to be moved out of Saskatchewan over the next 48 hours.

“At this point in time, we are continuing to do assessments on a daily basis,” Pritchard said, calling the situation “fluid.”

Scott Livingstone, the CEO of the Saskatchewan Health Authority, said the resources provided by the federal government, as well as dropping rates of daily case numbers and hospitalizations, are helping stabilize the system.

“As case numbers drop, we are still seeing pressures in acute care. Certainly we are still seeing pressures in ICU, both COVID and non-COVID,” Livingstone explained. “The biggest impact these resources have is to help alleviate the staff on the ground.”

Livingstone described the state of staff on the ground as “tired.”

“They’ve been working at a very, very high acuity rate in our ICUs for multiple weeks,” he said. “This type of care is not sustainable.”

Livingstone said the hope is to see the numbers in Saskatchewan intensive care units level off over the next several weeks, as they tend to lag behind the decline in daily COVID cases.

Dr. Saqib Shahab, the province’s chief medical health officer, said it will take four to six weeks for ICU hospitalizations to stabilize.