A flu season that started early, hospitalized many more children than usual and overwhelmed emergency departments has revealed that Canada’s health care system is chronically underfunded when it comes to its most vulnerable citizens, a specialist says in pediatric infectious diseases.
Dr. Jesse Papenburg, who works at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, said a system that was already struggling with a rise in respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, after COVID-19 is now largely overwhelmed of the country.
“Certainly, Ontario and Alberta in particular have been hit hard with an early flu season and really explosive in pediatrics when it comes to more serious illnesses that require complex hospitalization. And we’re also seeing in Montreal that our revenue for flu are really starting to pick up,” he said.
The last week of November had the highest number of pediatric hospitalizations in a single week in the last decade, said Papenburg, who is also an investigator for IMPACT, a program that tracks hospitalizations for vaccine-preventable diseases in 12 children’s hospitals throughout the country.
A typical flu season puts about 1,000 children in the hospital. Because of pandemic public health measures, he said they saw only 400 last season and none the season before.
As of the end of November, more than 700 children had been hospitalized with the H3N2 strain of flu, which typically affects older adults. But the season could continue into March or April, Papenburg said of the unexpected outbreak.
“When you’re already on the edge under normal circumstances and there’s something exceptional that takes place, it really has a bigger impact on the kind of care that we can provide to Canadian children,” he said. “It is unacceptable, in my view, that this should happen, that we have to delay important surgeries for children because we need these resources to deal with acute respiratory infections.”
Although the number of RSV hospitalizations is stabilizing, there is still a “significant burden of disease requiring complex hospitalization,” he said of the Montreal hospital.
Alex Munter, president of Ottawa’s pediatric hospital, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), said the Red Cross will help reduce pressure on critical care staff from this week.
He said two teams of nine people will work in rotating shifts overnight and some will be porters, while others will receive supplies or sit with patients.
“Having these Red Cross teams in place will allow us to send redeployed personnel back to their base,” he said.
“The test positivity rate last week for flu was 30% compared to 10% at the end of October. That’s a big increase and it’s still going up, so flu hospitalizations are going up and RSV is leveling off,” Munter said.
CHEO, including its emergency department and urgent care clinic, is also getting help from pediatricians, family doctors and community nurses while some patients are transferred to adult hospitals, Munter said.
“We cannot run our hospital this way in perpetuity. I think the moral of the story here is that we have an undersized child and youth health system in Canada.”
SickKids Toronto continues to see a high volume of patients in the pediatric intensive care unit and has reduced the number of surgeries since November so that staff can be redeployed to provide care in that unit.
“We have been coordinating closely with other hospital partners who have the capacity to serve some pediatric patients,” the hospital said in a statement, adding that it is not currently seeking staffing support from outside organizations.
Dr. Shazma Mithani, an emergency physician at the Stollery Children’s Hospital and Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, said the temporary closure of a pediatric hospice in Calgary is “tragic” as staff are being diverted to a children’s hospital.
“It means that children who are dying are not getting the comfort and palliative care they deserve and need, and that acute care takes priority over that,” Mithani said.
Federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos has said Ottawa recently gave the provinces an extra $2 billion as demands grow from both levels of government to do more to help struggling hospitals unprecedented
Mithani said the funding should go to children’s hospitals and could also go to out-of-hours clinics, for example.
He said people planning large indoor gatherings over Christmas and New Year’s Eve should consider scaling back, while schools should switch to temporary online learning if they have large numbers of viral diseases
Health officials also need to make a concerted effort to educate the public about the importance of vaccination amid misinformation on social media, Mithani said.
“The most vulnerable people in our society are suffering as a result of decisions made by adults. That’s what’s happening here, that children are suffering from the bad decisions of adults who make decisions that can’t seem to do the right thing to protect our children.”
With archives from Jordon Omstead in Toronto.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on December 5, 2022.
This story is produced with financial assistance from the Canadian Medical Association. He has no say in editorial choices.
Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version said the children’s hospice is in Edmonton.