MSH LONG-TERM CARE
WORKING TOGETHER FOR THE LONG TERM MSH partners with community long-term care homes during COVID-19, supporting home staff across the region with education and training | BY NINA DRAGICEVIC
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t’s in the DNA of health care workers to provide support to the most vulnerable populations. In fact, years before the pandemic landed, MSH was already working closely with long-term care homes (LTCHs) in the community through a nurse led outreach team. For the past several years, these outreach teams have been supporting LTCHs within the hospital’s catchment area to facilitate enhanced care for residents. So at the start of the pandemic, when the province requested hospitals to step in and help LTCHs, MSH already had relationships established. MSH’s mobile outreach team plays a supportive role for many of the region’s long-term care facilities, preventing unnecessary hospital admissions and facilitating transfer back when an admission occurs. This is consistent with the hospital’s guiding vision: ‘Care beyond our walls’.” “For our hospital, COVID-19 has reinforced that vision,” says Cheryl Osborne, patient care director of MSH’s emergency and ambulatory services. “And we’re honoured to
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Markham Stouffville Hospital Foundation
do it. The pandemic has brought that vision to life for me like never before. It’s absolutely saving hundreds of lives across the region. Now, in a proactive way, we need to forge new partnerships and work together to fight the second wave. We can’t do it all, and our community partners can’t do it all,” says Cheryl. “We’ve seen that in longterm care. When we’ve shared information and resources, it’s made a huge difference.” The first wave of COVID-19 quickly became an urgent priority for hospitals across the country. And for frontline health care workers, the next few months were a blur. “Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve been working 18-hour days, seven days a week, here at the hospital,” says Cheryl. “We’ve been one of the hardest-hit hospitals in the province. Right from the very beginning, York Region was one of the busiest areas. We were trying to manage our internal processes.” By April, Cheryl says it was clear LTCHs were struggling with outbreaks. And while cases dropped over the summer months, they started to ramp up again in the fall,
resulting in new outbreaks. Public Health assigns each LTCH a colour based on pandemic risk: red means the home is in an outbreak crisis; yellow denotes issues that require improvement but are manageable; and green means there may be COVID-19 cases present but the situation is resolving well. Some LTCHs that had progressed to green in the summer months are now turning back to yellow or red. “We must help homes that are yellow or red — and help them quickly — or transferring patients to hospital will be their only option,” says Cheryl. “That’s not what the patients want, that’s not what the homes want, but without the proper support it will be an escalating situation with no alternative.” Which isn’t ideal for hospitals either, with increased pressure put on already limited resources. In the spring, MSH rapidly pulled together a comprehensive community response; mobile team of health care professionals were dispatched to LTCHs in need. Cheryl offered to helm the mission, since she was familiar with the LTCH
