Database of Health Workforce Innovations
644
Redeployment and Expanded Roles at McGill University Health Centre
Cordelia McNeal is a nurse clinician at the Montreal Chest Institute Day Hospital who took on the challenge of setting up C4 – the first COVID Unit as its nurse manager. She and her team had one week to prepare the area to receive patients, and along with the tight timeline, came difficult emotions linked to the uncertainty of the pandemic. Physicians have also been reassigned outside their specialties to provide bedside care to patients infected with COVID-19. Dr. Beatrice Wang, director of the MUHC Melanoma Clinic, is one of six dermatologists to step out of her specialty to work on the COVID unit.
- Licensure flexibility
- Cross-sector staff deployments
- Rapid upskilling/reskilling existing and available workers (eg. laid off)
- Alternative deployments for health workers whose normal duties are temporarily suspended
- Task shifting/delegation
- Nurse Practitioners*
- Nurse Specialists*
- Nurses - Licensed Practical
- Nurses - Registered
- Physicians - Emergency
- Physicians - Intensive Care
- Physicians - Primary/Family
- Physicians - Specialists
- Respiratory Therapists
Within the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), staff have been redeployed to meet the demands of COVID-19. Over the last few weeks, Dr. Kevin Schwartzman, director of the Division of Respiratory Medicine at the MUHC, and his colleagues have been devoted to ramping up capacity--in part by converting part of the Centre for Innovative Medicine at the Glen, a space usually reserved for research, into C4, a unit dedicated entirely to caring for patients with COVID-19. In a matter of weeks, COVID ward capacity grew to over 100 beds across the MUHC, while COVID ICU capacity grew to 50 beds
- Critical Care
- Diagnostic Services
- Emergency Medical Services
- Hospitals
- Urban/Suburban
Formal Strategy
McGill University Health Centre
Canada - Quebec