Yellowknife (Mar 07/03) - Stanton Territorial Hospital's intensive care unit will re-open in mid-May, said interim chief executive officer Al Woods.

The four-bed unit closed last June 7 because of a nursing shortage. It remained closed because there weren't enough trained ICU nurses.

"I think we've got to be able to deliver our mandate to deliver health care to the Northwest Territories," said Stanton's clinical education co-ordinator, Suzanne Wade.

"We have to promise that. We are a territorial hospital not a Yellowknife hospital."

Woods agreed: "It will help an awful lot. We will probably do a lot more intensive surgery than we normally do and more patients will be kept here instead of being moved South."

Since the unit closed, ICU patients have been kept in the emergency department, stabilized and sent to another department or medevaced to Edmonton, said Celine Pelletier, manager of medical services.

She said between five and nine patients a month would have to be shuffled to a different area of the hospital while between three and 13 a month were medevaced because the ICU was closed, said Pelletier. Each medevac flight costs at least $10,000 each.

When it's open, the ICU is usually only 30 to 40 per cent full. Most of those patients stay two to 10 days.

When they're stable enough they're moved to a regular ward.

Besides saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in medevac flights, the ICU is also a great recruitment incentive for doctors, said Woods.

Rigorous training

ICU training is an "intense" experience, said Wade.

"It's very in-depth right down to the cellular level and in every body system.

"They have to be able to predict and look down the road. They have to know what can go wrong and the process to fix things," she said.

The hospital presently has five nurses with ICU training. They've been working in other areas of the hospital over the past nine months because nine nurses are needed to keep the ICU open, two nurses per shift.

The four ICU nurses in training -- Susan Escott, Susan MacInnis, Brandy Condly and Shelley Cunningham -- are all from Stanton's regular staff and will be trained in time for a mid-May opening. It's costing the territory $150,000, including salaries and travel expenses, said Woods.

The nurses are now finishing off their 10-week theoretical training through correspondence and video conferencing.

Then they will spend two to three weeks working in Calgary hospital ICUs.

The nurses see the training as an opportunity of a life time.

"Really, who wouldn't," said Escott. "You get really in-depth and you know what to do when people are really critically ill."

Escott said while the situations will be more stressful, it's a different kind of stress from what she's used to during her regular duties.

Instead of tending to 10 patients on a floor, the nurses will focus totally on the one or two patients in ICU.

Wade said the practical experience in Calgary will focus on situations specific to the territory, which include coronary problems, surgeries and respiratory problems.

The nurses leave for Calgary on March 16.