New Brunswick health officials are taking extraordinary steps to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic.
That includes reaching out to retired physicians and nurses to see if they may be able to help out in any capacity.
“Normally there’s a fair process to get that in place, but I can tell that process has been accelerated greatly,” said Dr. Ken Gillespie, chief of staff at The Moncton Hospital, during a news conference Friday.
“For example, we reached out to a retired physician on Wednesday night and he is now fully privileged at the hospital and were meeting with him [Friday] afternoon to let him know what his new job will be.”
Gillespie said he has also been receiving phone calls daily from current physicians asking how they can help.
He said the physicians are doing less work in their offices and they want to help get the province prepared for the situation.
Ventilator Supply
Hospitals across the country have been scrambling to secure more ventilators to prepare for an outbreak.
Gillespie said New Brunswick has a “pretty good” number of ventilators per capita than many other places across Canada and North America.
But he said the ability of the health-care system to look after seriously ill patients will depend a lot on public actions.
“The workload is either going to be spread out over a very long period of time or a very short period of time,” said Gillespie.
“If it’s a very short period of time, then we’re going to be in trouble. If it’s spread out over a long period of time, we’re going to be totally fine.”
Gillespie said hand-washing and practicing social distancing are important to help reduce the spread of the virus.
Masks In Hospitals
As officials prepare for an outbreak, Gillespie reassured New Brunswickers there is no shortage of masks in the province.
He said they have about four-million surgical masks and 500,000 N95 masks in supply.
Gillespie said there is a notion in the public and the health-care system that N95 masks need to be used all the time.
“The problem with that is that if people do that … then we would burn through our N95 mask supply very quickly,” he said.
Gillespie said N95 masks are really only helpful when there is an aerosol-generating procedure being performed.
