There are 122 children in pediatric intensive care units as of Wednesday, up from 111 the previous day, according to Critical Care Services Ontario’s daily count.  Only five children in ICU have COVID-19.  The province has a total of 112 intensive care beds for children.
Children’s hospitals across Ontario have been overwhelmed in the past month, largely due to the flu and respiratory syncytial virus, both of which have struck a month earlier than usual.
The agency that oversees the province’s health system has instructed general and community hospitals to accept children who are healthy enough to leave intensive care but still need hospital care while they recover, said Ontario Health chief medical officer Dr.  Chris Simpson.
“Once they’re ready to go to the next step, they go to the next step,” Simpson said.
“From a capacity perspective, that flow of patients is really, really important.”
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The Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa has opened a second ICU to cope with an “unprecedented increase.”  It has canceled non-urgent surgeries and redeployed staff to meet demand.  Similar situations are affecting children’s hospitals in Toronto and Hamilton.
Simpson said hospitals will use a “dimmer switch” on surgeries, rather than canceling surgeries altogether as they did during some of the worst waves of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We want to stay away from that blunt instrument and just encourage hospitals to call them and call them as much as necessary to accommodate these surge forces,” Simpson said.
There are about 250,000 delayed surgeries, Simpson said.  He said it’s about the same number as before the pandemic, but that people are now waiting longer to have these surgeries — about 45 percent are waiting longer than the clinically defined benchmark.
He said they are making progress on the backlog.
“This increase is likely to slow our progress on that front a bit,” Simpson said.  “There’s just no, there’s no getting around that.”
Last week, Ontario Health instructed general hospitals to admit patients 14 and older who need intensive care.
But CHEO said the vast majority of his patients are five years old and younger.
Children and teenagers are also visiting emergency departments at a rate two to three times higher than usual at this time of year, according to statistics from Acute Care Enhanced Surveillance, a real-time Ontario-wide system that tracks enrollment records in hospital.
There were an average of 1,414 children aged four and under who visited emergency departments in the last week in the province, compared to the historical average of 560 children over seven days.  For those aged five to 17, there were an average of 1,210 emergency department visits in the past week compared to the historical average of 325 visits.
Simpson said that because staffing is so tight at hospitals, the only way to deal with the increase is to redeploy staff.
“We just have to adapt them to meet the demands of the moment and that means we have to slow down some other things,” he said.
Ontario Health teams meet daily, he said.
“I think I feel a lot less anxious than I did a few weeks ago because I think we have a good plan,” Simpson said.  “The surge is coming, there’s very little we can do about it now, it’s kind of baked in and I think it’s just about being prepared.”
A spokeswoman for Health Minister Sylvia Jones said the government is in “constant contact with our children’s hospitals, Ontario Health and other health system partners to ease critical care pressures and ensure all patients receive the care they need ».
“The Minister has spoken to the Chief Executives of Children’s Hospitals over the last few days and has offered the Government’s full support to get us through this difficult time,” said Hannah Jensen.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on November 10, 2022.