As ICUs fill up, doctors confront grim choice of who gets life-saving care – CBC

Ontario’s protocol for critical-care triage worries disability rights advocates

Apr 19, 2021

Hospitals are shifting critically ill patients around, looking for any empty bed. Nurses and doctors are putting in exhaustion-defying amounts of overtime. Some provinces are opening new intensive care unit capacity.

But it may not be enough to stave off a point no one wants to reach in the pandemic — when only a handful of ICU beds remain but a greater number of patients need those spots.

That point is drawing perilously close in Ontario and possibly parts of Saskatchewan, even as some other provinces don’t have a single hospitalized COVID-19 patient.

It means some of the hardest decisions health-care providers ever face will have to be made: who gets potentially life-saving care and who doesn’t.

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-ontario-icu-triage-1.5992188