THE Eastern Regional Health Authority (ERHA) is using a Canadian-based triage system to treat Covid-19 patients.
This was revealed by Chief Executive Officer of ERHA Ronald Tsoi-A-Fatt at the Ministry of Health Covid-19 update on Monday.
He said an extra ward was created for patients pending transfer into the parallel healthcare system and like other RHAs there was an increased number of cases showing up at the accident and emergency departments in need of critical care especially at the Sangre Grande Hospital.
Tsoi-A-Fatt said, “Some of them require high dependency care and intensive care even when they come in at the hospital. So how do we manage this?
“We use the Canadian Triage Accuracy Scale to determine the level of illness and severity. That helps us to assign how we take care, we then move from there very quickly into streaming them into the area of the Covid stream or the ordinary health care stream.”
The triage system is one of the ministry’s last resort in managing Covid-19 patients in the parallel healthcare system as the number is increasing daily.
Last month, Thoracic Medical Director of the Caura Hospital Dr Michelle Trotman had defended the measure saying, “Triage looks at patients to see how we can get the best outcome for many patients.”
She explained three levels of triage.
“The ABC’s system assesses your airway, breathing and circulation before a decision is made as to what level of care is needed. While the CTAS System was originally a Canadian system which looked at acuity was used to determine the urgency of care that was required.
“We look at whether they need resuscitation right away, whether they were emergent, urgent or not so urgent and classified their treatment based on this.”
Tsoi-A-Fatt also said there were three satellite A and E departments which were Rio Claro Health Centre, Mayaro District Facility and 24-hour Accident and Emergency in Toco.
“At all of these we see increases upwards of 25 swabs, in the Sangre Grande Enhanced Health Centre we are doing as many as 100 swabs per day. The Nariva, Mayaro actual cases, we have 215 active home quarantine cases and in St Andrews, St David we have about 380 active home cases under quarantine,” he said.
The ERHA has also increased the number of isolation areas in order to preserve the separation of Covid cases from the normal stream cases, Tsoi-A-Fatt said.
“In terms of vaccination uptake we have a dive in the vaccination update over time and now we are doing low numbers daily,” the CEO said.
He added, “In the ERHA looking particularly in the north coast we have very low uptake rates from to 10% to sometimes 19% of our communities are vaccinated.”
ERHA’s Disaster Awareness Coordinator Alana Lewis spoke about the Emergency Operation Centre that was first activated in January 2020 and was one of the firsts in the country.
She said, “What we did as an EOC team, we coordinated very closely with the other RHA and the Ministry of Health and the regional corporation. We also engaged in outreach and education activities to get our communities that we serve ready.”
