Burnt-out health-care workers fear Omicron surges in Canadian hospitals

After dealing with Delta surges, health-care workers worry they're about to face another wave of COVID-19 patients, this time infected with the highly contagious Omicron variant.

For Dr. Laura Hawryluck, one of the challenges of working in a strained health-care system is no longer having the time to personally relate to patients.

Under constant pressure due to COVID-19 and staff shortages, Hawryluck said hospital workers are forced to become more task-oriented, doing what they must to keep patients alive and losing the time to really understand them.

Throw the Omicron variant into the mix, and health-care workers are finding themselves in a situation of “dread mixed with a lot of worry” that hospitals will once again fill up with COVID-19 patients, Hawryluck said.

“The worry is that having navigated now four waves of this — and this going to be our fifth one by our count — we’ve lost a lot of staff and people have been working all kinds of hours and redeployed situations,” said Hawryluck, a critical care doctor in Toronto.

“(It) has us, frankly, very concerned over whether or not we’re going to be able to provide the level of help that we want to.”

Canadian health-care workers have been on the front lines throughout the pandemic, dealing with four waves of COVID-19 patients flowing through the hospital system.

At several points in the pandemic, provinces have had to send in requests to the federal government for help with hospital staffing. Most recently, Manitoba put in a formal request for additional intensive care unit (ICU) staff to help alleviate its stretched-out system.

This relentless trend has led to industry-wide burnout, exhaustion and staff shortages. According to Statistics Canada, earlier this year nearly one in five job vacancies in Canada was in health care and social assistance; those sectors experienced the largest losses year over year compared to all other sectors.