City of Hamilton, health partners take lessons learned from Rosslyn to devise outbreak guidelines for LTC

By

Published May 25, 2020 at 1:08 pm

The City of Hamilton and its local health-care partners have devised a series of recommendations to manage and prevent outbreaks in long-term care and congregate settings.

The City of Hamilton and its local health-care partners have devised a series of recommendations to manage and prevent outbreaks in long-term care and congregate settings.

In a press release issued over the weekend, the City says that following the devastating outbreak at The Rosslyn Retirement Home in East Hamilton, they and their partners are providing these recommendations to the Ontario Health – West region of the Province.

“The recommendations are the result of a debrief between key partners involved in the Rosslyn crisis response, including the City of Hamilton, Hamilton Public Health, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, LHIN Home and Community Care, and Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS),” the release says.

The outbreak of COVID-19 at The Rosslyn earlier this month forced the evacuation of the facility and saw all of its residents — it is a 64-bed facility and the city’s COVID-19 website says 64 residents have tested positive for the virus — and a vast majority of its staff test positive for the virus.

There have been at least two deaths associated with the outbreak.

“The severity of the situation at the Rosslyn Retirement Residence can not be understated,” says Rob MacIsaac, chair of the Hamilton-Niagara-Haldimand-Brant regional pandemic command table and chief executive officer at HHS.

“We have carefully reviewed the series of events and feel it is our collective duty to share our findings and recommendations with the Province so that we can do better by those living in congregate care settings across Ontario.”

The recommendations call for:

  • Immediate testing of residents and healthcare workers in high-risk retirement homes with a plan to spread to other high-risk congregate settings
  • Proactive identification of an alternate healthcare facility that a home can access in a crisis situation
  • Clearer accountability, roles, and responsibilities of those who operate and work in congregate settings
  • Basic standards and requirements of physicians who provide care to residents in congregate settings
  • Formal structure at municipal level to oversee these kinds of required decants/actions
  • Completion of functional assessments in congregate settings to review things such as administrative structures, medication systems, medical model, etc.
  • Hospitals to back each other up as needed to be able to respond to non-crisis requests from congregate settings outside of their municipality.
  • A line of sight to role and accountability of regulatory bodies for retirement homes
  • Development of a more formal infrastructure to support congregate settings to ensure a coordinated health system response to the pandemic

As of Monday morning (May 25), there are seven active outbreaks at congregate-care and long-term care facilities across the city.

insauga's Editorial Standards and Policies advertising