A prominent Toronto physician is warning that GTA hospitals may soon run out of essential medical equipment needed to treat patients with suspected and confirmed cases of COVID-19.

Dr. Michael Warner, medical director of critical care at Michael Garron Hospital (formerly Toronto East General), says physician colleagues around the city are raising the alarm that supplies of personal protective equipment used by medical professionals – N95 masks, gowns, face shields and gloves – are on track to reach critically low levels as the pandemic grows.

Warner says his hospital in particular has about three weeks worth of protective equipment if the current usage rate continues.

“If I have patients coming to my hospital and there’s no personal protective equipment for me or the nurses or the person who mops the floor or delivers the food – everyone needs it who enters that room – then patients won’t get treatment and people will die,” he told the Star Saturday, adding that doctors in his ICU have had to order their own goggles from Amazon “because we know we’re going to run out of face shields.”

“If you’re being put into battle and you have no guarantee that you’re going to have the tools you need to battle with, at least the minimal base protection, that causes a huge amount of anxiety,” Warner said.

On Saturday, the government launched what it is calling “Ontario Together,” a website aimed at assisting businesses, particularly the manufacturing sector, redeploy resources for the production of essential equipment such as masks and ventilators. This follows the government’s announcement last Tuesday that it was making a $304 million investment to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic, including $50 million to increase the supply of personal protective equipment and other critical supplies frontline health workers rely on.

“Recognizing increased demand for equipment and supplies, Ontario is at all times in active discussions with our manufacturing and supply chain partners to procure more personal protective equipment,” Hayley Chazan, a spokesperson for Health Minister Christine Elliott, told the Star.

“Because of that work, we’ve procured 300 more ventilators to add to the 210 we currently have in unallocated surplus. The Command Table is working with our health system partners to identify which hospitals are most in need to allocate additional equipment appropriately as we continue to work on procuring additional ventilators.”

That can’t happen fast enough, said Doris Grinspun, CEO of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO), which represents registered nurses, nurse practitioners and nursing students in the province. Her organization is recommending to the province that it instruct universities and colleges with medical simulation labs to turn over their supplies to local health services that Grinspun said “at this point may be more or less okay but in a week, who knows?”

The RNAO is also requesting that all Ontarians, regardless of age, stay in their homes for the next 14 days.

“Every day that we delay that, we are actually putting the health system at risk of not being able to respond as needed,” Grinspun said. “It’s time to do that and the time is today.”

Warner said he was encouraged to hear of the province’s new initiative, calling it an “important step,” but stressed the urgency of understanding what hospitals across the country currently have in their inventories so that it can be deployed to areas that need it most.

Warner has spent days phoning dental offices, construction companies, and cosmetic and veterinarian clinics – all businesses that use protective equipment of this nature – asking them to hand over that which they don’t need.

“It’s like a puzzle. If one piece is missing, the other components are useless. So if I have gloves and a mask, but no gowns, I still can’t go in the room,” said Warner. “If I have a shiny ventilator from the minister, that’s great. But if I can’t go into the room to use it, the patient is still going to die.”

Erica Di Maio, a spokesperson for Michael Garron Hospital, confirmed the facility has “a few weeks” of personal protective equipment in stock. She said hospital staff are working on a number of strategies to conserve protective equipment and meet increasing demands, “including an ethical decision-making framework around rationing personal protective equipment, identifying how to make what we have last longer.”

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Alison Thompson, a professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto, said a potential lack of personal protective equipment is a “major problem.”

“One of the key ethical principles for pandemics is reciprocity: there is an obligation to ensure that those who are responding to the pandemic on the front lines are working under safe conditions,” she said. “When health care providers and other first responders are not protected, it makes it very hard for them to come to work, especially if they are worried about bringing illness home with them to their families. They have a duty to care, but the government has a duty to ensure that they can provide that care with full protections and with a safe workplace.”