As you know, we are still receiving large numbers of patients through our Emergency Departments. Some of these patients arrive with flu symptoms, receive care and go home but the sickest are admitted. So I can only underline the prevention messages – wash your hands, avoid sneezing into anything but tissue or your sleeve and if you’re unwell, stay home and recover. If you haven’t had your flu shot, you can still get one and since I’m told that the flu season was late and may linger, it isn’t too late.
While the flu is a factor, we continue to see increasing numbers of patients for other reasons and we are working with the Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network (TC-LHIN) on the funding for surge beds and ICU beds at UHN. We had a long discussion about it at the meeting of our Board of Trustees last week and they recognize how hard everyone is working to care for patients which includes rebooking and rescheduling patients whose procedures have been cancelled.
My final note for last week concerns the media reports about a person who was employed at UHN. You may wonder why there was very little from UHN in the stories so I wanted to let everyone know that UHN does not comment on matters of individual employment, nor do we talk about individual investigations or the results of an investigation. This is our policy with regard to individual matters of employment or the details of individual patient cases. In both instances, if we commented, we would be violating our responsibilities with regard to individual privacy.
Charlie
