Hamilton Health Sciences and St. Joseph’s Healthcare short 224 staff while fighting COVID

In the middle of a pandemic, Hamilton's hospitals are short 224 staff.

Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) has 148 active job postings - 45 per cent are nurses, 30 per cent are jobs in pharmacy, imaging, labs and other health professionals, and 25 per cent are in administrative and support.

St. Joseph's Healthcare has 76 vacancies and is recruiting nurses, lab technologists and psychologists.

At the same time 113 staff and learners have tested positive for COVID-19 at Hamiltons hospitals as of Oct 15 - 76 at HHS and 37 at St. Joseph's. Nearly half of those are nurses.

The pandemic is taking a toll on our staff and physicians both at work and at home," HHS vice president of human resources Michele Leroux said in a statement. Despite this, they continue to show up every day and simply go above and beyond to care for our community."

A public health analysis of local cases has found one in five COVID infections is a health care worker.

It's such a significant number that it resulted in women being more likely to be infected by the virus than men in Hamilton.

When we actually do a deeper dive into that we see that it's largely driven by that gender difference in the health care worker occupation," said city epidemiologist Mackenzie Slifierz, when the report was presented to the board of health Oct. 19. When we look at our health care workers (infected), 80 per cent are female."

Public health found a vastly different result when it removed health care workers from the analysis of cases from March 1 to Aug. 31.

It's closer to that 50/50 split," said Slifierz.

Of Hamilton's 173 female health care workers infected, nearly two-thirds are from a category labelled other" that includes a variety of jobs such as cleaners, personal support workers, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, rehabilitation therapists, secretarial support, social workers, pharmacists and administrators. The cases included 44 nurses, four doctors, three who work in dentist's offices, two first responders and one laboratory worker.

Of the 47 male health care workers infected, 45 per cent are from the other category, 10 are doctors, seven are nurses, three are first responders and two are laboratory workers.

Joanna Frketich is a Hamilton-based reporter covering health for The Spectator. Reach her via email: jfrketich@thespec.comwith files from Katrina Clarke