40 people with COVID-19 to be moved from Kitchener long-term care home to hospital

A long-term care home in Kitchener will move 40 people out of the home and into Waterloo region's three hospitals over the next two days to help manage a massive outbreak of COVID-19.

Forest Heights Revera has 240 residents. As of Monday at 7 p.m., 103 residents and 41 staff members had tested positive for COVID-19. Twelve people who lived at the home had died.

Revera, the company that runs the home, says the three hospitals have all agreed to take in their residents. They will put them "into the most appropriate available hospital beds."

Revera officials said the plan now is to:

• Determine which people "are most medically appropriate" to move to a hospital.
• Talk to family members of the people who will be moved.
• Transport them over the next two days to St. Mary's General Hospital and Grand River Hospital in Kitchener as well as Cambridge Memorial Hospital.
• Hospital staff will support and care for the people.
• Residents will be returned to Forest Heights "at the appropriate time."

Some people have already been moved: three went to Grand River Hospital, three to Cambridge Memorial Hospital and two to St. Mary's.

In all, Cambridge Memorial is expected to take 20 people because it currently has the most capacity and it's able to open a dedicated COVID-19 unit quickly.

The hospitals are also offering support including an infection control specialist who will work with the home as it does deep-cleaning of rooms.

Lee Fairclough, president of St. Mary's Hospital, said in a statement that the plan was an "important opportunity to come together as hospitals with other sectors to provide support to Forest Heights to ensure care for their residents and address the outbreak during these very challenging times."

Employees off work, ill

On Monday, Dr. Hsiu-Li Wang, the region's acting medical officer of health, said she expects the number of cases at Forest Heights Revera to climb as some test results were still coming in.

Case loads at area hospitals since the pandemic started have been manageable, Wang said.

Revera says they're also facing staffing issues "with several employees off work, ill or in isolation." But employees who are still on the job have been working "incredibly hard, long hours."

Rhonda Collins, the chief medical officer for the company, said the plan to move some residents to local hospitals will allow more space between residents, particularly in some parts of the home where there are four people in one room. Out of the 240 residents, 136 of them are in four-person rooms.

"These older homes with four-bed wards are very challenging when it comes to isolating residents and cohorting positive residents," she said in an interview on Tuesday. 

When people are moved, Collins says one unit will be deep-cleaned entirely and then residents will be moved into that unit while other areas of the home are cleaned thoroughly.

Additional staff have been brought in, both through Revera's own recruiting and by the Waterloo-Wellington Local Health Integration Network (LHIN).

"The staff and the physicians at this site have just been working non-stop and a lot of overtime and probably getting pretty exhausted," Collins said. "Going down to a regular staffing level will allow our staff to take a break. Some of them need some days off and it will allow the staff who are there to be able to do their jobs more effectively."

'Some optimism now'

Collins says the past week has been hard but now that there is a plan in place, staff, people who live at the home and their families are feeling better about what may happen in the coming days and weeks.

"This is a challenging thing for families and residents to have to go through and that's why it was the last decision that we made and hopefully it will be a very effective decision and we can get our residents back to their home as soon as possible. I think there's some optimism now that that can happen," she said.