I apologize. I thought Dr. Drummond was going to lead us off.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear. We plan to utilize our time by focusing on the immediate situation of vaccination and the vital need to engage with frontline workers and their associations. There are other points that we will be mentioning later on.
Our first priority has to be to repeat our call for increased transparency around the prioritization and administration of the COVID-19 vaccines and the plans for the vaccinations going forward. Unfortunately, there remains confusion, lack of transparency and mixed messaging around prioritization. We urge there to be central, federal coordination of efforts with clear, consistent and transparent messaging.
Why are we calling for this? It's because we see the stark example of this problem in the fact that there are still people working in Canadian emergency departments who have not been vaccinated or not completely vaccinated. Of particular concern for us are those working in smaller, isolated and rural communities. We are highlighting health care workers because of the precarious state of the health care system and its dependence on workers who are already overstretched. Plainly said, if our health care workers are incapacitated due to COVID-19, the system won't be able to take care of the population at large. As I said, but it needs reinforcing, most troubling is the fact that vaccination has been delayed for emergency personnel in rural and isolated communities. The risk there is that because they don't have as many people and as many backup personnel, the smaller population of providers means that there are not others who can step up and fill in for colleagues who fall ill. The risk of system collapse in rural communities is much higher. That also has caused frustration for health care personnel and added to the burden of working in a system that was already overloaded even prior to the pandemic.
We as health care workers have been repeatedly thanked. We've been hailed as heroes. The reality is that we are workers, no less than any others, who deserve a safe work environment. Instead, all too often the assumption has been that we will simply accept increased risks without consistent, evidence-based assessment and mitigation of those risks. In fact, we even saw last week one provincial government fail to recognize that emergency department nurses are a higher-risk group that treats COVID-19 patients often before they have been identified as cases.
Our members and our colleagues on the front lines have continued to step up and care for the sickest patients in our communities. Transparency, communication and adherence to an ethical framework in vaccine prioritization and administration are the minimum they should receive in return. We have seen many missteps up until now. We are looking forward to the ramp-up, but we want assurance that those missteps won't be enlarged and expanded as we ramp up.
We also want to talk about the conditions that hindered the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and that need to be addressed now in order to prevent a third wave that's even worse than the second and to support the health care system’s ability to respond and to resolve vulnerabilities prior to the next health care crisis. Think about the idea of a system that's resilient and able to respond. It needs surge capacity, which is eliminated when there's pre-existing crowding. It needs adequate staff, which requires HHR planning. It requires adequate supplies, which requires stockpiles, domestic production capacity, and a strategy to prevent shortages of medications and supplies. It needs an appropriate working environment, which requires hospital design. It requires adequate leadership and decision-making, such as an incident management system and clear communications.
At the beginning, we emphasized the point of keeping the system resilient, which requires vaccinating staff so that the capacity is there. I'll touch on a couple of these points specifically.
When we talk about surge capacity, we saw that hospitals completely shut down in wave one in order to create capacity to handle anticipated COVID-19 patients. Hospitals function most adequately and appropriately at 85% capacity. Even before COVID, most hospitals in this country were operating at or above 100%. That is not suitable; it is not appropriate. It wasn't then. It isn't now, and it won't be in the future.
We cannot go back to the old normal. That has added to the strain on emergency department workers. We have been and are continuing to see emergency department staff leave the emergency department to work elsewhere or leave the profession. Unfortunately, we have also seen at least one colleague who has been lost to suicide in the last year.
I see that my time is coming to an end. We have submitted a written brief with more details and we will be happy to answer questions from the committee.
Thank you.