Thousands of nurses in Ontario are willing to come out of retirement, pause their education plans or work extra hours to join health care workers on the front lines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario last week asked their members for assistance during the health crisis, and more than 3,300 nurses have since signed their names to an ever-growing list of those willing to help.

Both registered nurses and nurse practitioners are quickly being hired by public or district health units in a province that needs more nurses to answer people’s questions about COVID-19. Some are being hired by Telehealth Ontario, a provincial service that has been flooded with calls, to ease the pressure and reduce hours-long wait times.

Doris Grinspun, chief executive officer of the RNAO, said the association reached out to its some 43,500 members because it anticipated a shortfall of health care workers as the COVID-19 virus took hold in Canada.

“The system was already stretched,” she said. “No system is well-prepared for a pandemic in terms of having enough surge capacity. We saw that need and we were one step ahead of the demand.”

Nurses who have come forward so far will help in a virtual capacity, answering COVID-19 questions and screening for the virus by phone and email. But Grinspun said that a second call-out is being planned in the coming days to ask its members to help in hospital intensive care units and step-down wards once hospitals experience a surge of patients with severe symptoms of COVID-19 needing specialized care.

“We know those units will get stretched. Some nurses will contract COVID-19, or will need to go into self-isolation, like we’ve seen in other countries. We know hospitals will need more help and we want to be two steps ahead of the game.”

While she expects fewer nurses — perhaps hundreds instead of thousands — will offer to help in an ICU, Grinspun said she knows there will still be many who want to assist, including recently retired nurses with specialty knowledge or critical care nurses who have stepped away from the front lines to pursue graduate degrees.

“We will ask who wants to help and have that resource and if we don’t need to use them, then beautiful.”

On Friday, Ottawa Public Health was struggling to keep up with the hundreds of calls it was receiving from people with questions about COVID-19. The callers, who included health care professionals, wanted answers about the virus, were seeking referrals to dedicated COVID-19 assessment centres and needed advice about social distancing, said Esther Moghadam, chief nursing officer and director of health promotion at Ottawa Public Health.

“At one point, we had 1,800 voice mails and our staff was going full out,” she said. That was when Moghadam asked the RNAO to see if any nurses who responded to the association’s survey would be willing to help Ottawa Public Health.

“I asked at 3 p.m. on Friday and within two hours, 20 nurses had responded,” she said. “Within four hours, 40 nurses had responded. It was incredible. And the nurses who responded were among the best nurses across the Ottawa region, from all across the health care sector.”

Three days later, 85 nurses had responded to the plea for help. Moghadam said Ottawa Public Health hired 59 nurses and the first cohort was trained and on the job by Sunday evening, 48 hours after she first asked for assistance.

“By Monday we had our voice mails down to 200,” she said, noting many of the COVID-19 calls can take at least 30 minutes. “We have to do an assessment; people are coming back from travelling, they’re worried, each case does present with some unique needs.”

Moghadam said Ottawa Public Health is grateful for the quick response, for both the nurses’ skills and for their time.

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“They have families, many have full-time jobs, but they just want to contribute.”

Grinspun said the RNAO has been closely watching COVID-19 sweep through other countries around the world and has seen how the virus can cripple health care systems. The association, which had its members work through SARS in 2003 and the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, can mobilize quickly when needed, she said.

In addition to helping in Ottawa, nurses from the RNAO call-out are also being hired in the North Bay Parry Sound Health District and by Telehealth Ontario in London.

“Nurses have unique characteristics,” Grinspun said. “Always, always, always, we step up to the plate, from our professional organization to the front-line nurses.”