The Saskatchewan hotel industry is getting ready to offer up rooms in the event that COVID-19 overwhelms the number of beds available in the province’s hospitals.
The Saskatchewan Hotel and Hospitality Association (SHHA) has created an emergency preparedness plan and shared it with the Ministry of Health and the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA). Jim Bence, president of the SHHA, has already had calls with the health ministry and the SHA to discuss how hotels can be utilized if they need to be transformed into field hospitals.
“What we thought was that as healthcare systems reached capacity, there’s a window of opportunity for us in Saskatchewan to make plans and at least have something in place that would allow the healthcare system to use other supports,” Bence said during a phone interview from Saskatoon on Tuesday.
Bence said the SHHA reached out to its members to ask who would be willing to lend assistance, and heard back from 70 hotels in the province. Bence said it would be up to the health authority to determine which hotels would be most appropriate to use.
Between Saskatoon and Regina alone, there are more than 7,500 hotel rooms. The emergency plan also refers to nine geographic regions in the province with hotel accommodations that could be made use of, including Regina, Saskatoon and Prince Albert.
The SHHA will provide the government a list of all qualified hotel properties, which have been categorized based on their capacity to offer support.
The SHHA is offering to house three groups of people during the pandemic. The first is vulnerable or displaced individuals. This includes people who use shelters, children’s crisis centres and health care workers isolating from their families.
The second is patients already in hospitals who can receive care in a different environment. This could include people recovering from surgery or receiving dialysis.
The third group is individuals who are contagious or presumptive patients who require the highest level of care and must be treated in sterile, segregated rooms with immediate access to health care professionals.
The government could very well need the industry’s offer of assistance. An internal SHA PowerPoint presentation obtained by the Leader-Post showed the organization expects COVID-19 will likely overwhelm the healthcare system and exceed existing capacity for hospital beds.
The SHA said it is working closely with the hotel association as it prepares for the spread of COVID-19 in the province.
“Right now, we are working to determine how we could best work together to help staff, patients and vulnerable people who need to self-isolate. We thank the association for its cooperation and willingness to provide support,” said a representative for the SHA in an emailed statement.
The hotel industry in the province is currently being battered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Bence said layoff rates at hotels are now on average above 80 per cent. Closures have been happening all over the province in small and medium-sized communities.
“The industry is under extreme duress. We will see, I believe, a number of closures of full-service hotels in the urban centres,” said Bence.
