Michelle DaCruz
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (June 05/02) - Stanton Regional Hospital is closing its intensive care unit this summer for the first time in their history, and hospital officials are adamant the closure will have little impact on patient care.

Donna Zaozirny, director of operations at Stanton, said "the availability of the ICU will be limited, due to staff shortages."

Zaozirny confirmed this is the first time that Stanton ICU has been closed. She said the hospital expects the number of medevacs to Edmonton to rise to be between six and eight for the summer months.

"We will maintain patients as well as we can," said Zaozirny. "If services are not available to maintain patients safely they will be medevaced to Edmonton."

Larry Elkin, chair of the Stanton Regional Health Authority, confirmed that the ICU will close from late June until early September.

Stanton, said Elkin, usually relies on permanent staff and a floating pool of workers to cover shortages.

"Due to the amount of overtime our staff has been working, we felt it was important to give them their vacation time in the summer," said Elkin. "We felt the best way to handle this was to close the unit."

The four-bed unit requires nine full-time nurses to be fully staffed. They are currently operating with 3.75 workers. Patients who require ICU services will be treated in the medical and pediatric wards instead, said Elkin.

"The increased costs of medevacs to Edmonton will be offset by savings incurred by paying fewer staff," said Elkin.

Pointing to the national shortage of health care workers, Zaozirny said "it was only a matter of time before this happened."

"ICU nurses require specialized skills and anyone with this type of experience and skill is in demand everywhere," she said.

Elkin said ICU nurses are "some of the most difficult positions to fill across Canada."

With continued recruitment and a new in-house ICU training program, hospital officials are confident they will have the unit open again September, said Zaozirny.

Deputy Minister of Health and Social Services, Mark Cleveland said he has been aware of staffing shortages for quite some time, but he first heard about Stanton's ICU closing from media reports this week. He said recruiting health care professionals is a top priority for the GNWT.

Great Slave MLA Bill Braden, and Brendan Bell, MLA Yellowknife South, said they were also unaware of the closing until they heard media reports.

Braden said "safety of patients is not the issue, but this will increase the level of inconvenience. It is bad for families if their loved ones are hospitalized away from home."