Ottawa Inner City Health has set up a Byward Market isolation dorm for homeless men sick with H1N1 to protect other homeless and the city’s hospitalized populations from catching swine flu.
Executive director Wendy Muckle says the strategy is crucial to blocking the spread of H1N1.
“You know all of the advice that you see in the media saying, ‘If you have these symptoms, then stay home?’ Well, they don’t have that option, so we have to create special circumstances,” Muckle says.
She says common health problems for the homeless, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, increase their risk of suffering severe complications from the flu, while their congested living conditions increase the likelihood of spread.
Around 1,000 people curl up under the covers at a handful of Ottawa emergency shelters every night.
“If the population that is staying in the shelters all got ill at the same time, we’d completely overwhelm the health-care system in Ottawa,” Muckle says.
Shelters will not admit anyone with flu-like symptoms until they are screened for H1N1 at the Ottawa Mission’s clinic, she adds.
Any influx of flu cases into hospitals can be hazardous because hospital patients are already in poor health and susceptible to viruses.
“The coverage here is quite good,” says James Ralph, who stayed in the dorm when he had H1N1 in September.
“In the hospital you would be exposing a heck of a lot more people to it than when you isolate it in here in a small community. It puts less people at risk,” he says.
The dorm is located in the special care unit for men on the third floor of the Salvation Army Booth Centre at 171 George St.
It is one big room with nine single beds cloaked in warm blankets and divided by padded partial walls covered in grey-blue industrial upholstery fabric.
There is a second identical dormatory and 13 private rooms down the hall where other men requiring short-term medical attention stay.
Nurse Louise Beaudoin has worked in the unit for nine years. She says her clients have less chance of spreading the flu on her floor than anywhere else.
“We have a cleaner on day-shift scrubbing 10 hours a day,” she says.
The off-white cinderblock walls are peppered with notices publicizing the need for hand washing and sneezing into the crook of the arm instead of into the hands.
Beaudoin says clients with H1N1 take Tylenol to ease discomfort and the anti-viral Tamiflu to reduce the severity and duration of their flu.
An H1N1 patient must keep his nose and mouth covered with a medical mask at all times, she says.
A masked and gloved nurse monitors the patient’s body temperature six times a day. After being fever-free without medication for 48 hours, patients are free to go.
The idea for the dorm came from the Ottawa Adult Homeless Sector Pandemic Plan, which was put into effect after the 2003 SARS scare.
Homeless families, women and youth are not included under the plan because they aren’t in regular contact with the adult emergency centres for men.