Seeing news footage of emergency rooms in New York City and northern Italy overrun with COVID-19 patients is unsettling. For Anthony Dale, Artsci’92, MPA’95, it is his job to make sure that does not happen in Ontario.
Normally, the chief executive officer of the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) acts as the voice for the province’s hospitals, lobbying government and dealing with regulatory and health-care policy issues. When COVID-19 hit, everything changed. For the past few weeks, Mr. Dale and the nearly 100-year-old organization have been completely focused on making sure hospitals are equipped for the pandemic.
“There is no playbook on how to deal with something of this scale,” says Mr. Dale, who has not taken a day off work since March 11. “This is an unprecedented moment in the history of our modern health-care system.”
So far, Ontario hospitals have benefitted from a flattening, and with the tragic exception of long-term care residences, the pandemic could have been far worse. Mr. Dale feels the OHA was one of many organizations that played an important role in advising the provincial government to make quick, drastic decisions that ultimately stopped COVID-19 from getting out of control.
He says the most significant action the OHA took to help flatten the curve was to send an urgent letter to Ontario Premier Doug Ford on March 13 saying Ontario hospitals were at risk of being overwhelmed. He demanded the premier take decisive action that day to start locking down the province. He feels the letter helped the premier and members of the Ontario Cabinet realize that making people stay at home would save lives.
Another critical issue the OHA helped with was finding personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospital staff. Mr. Dale says Ontario hospitals’ supply chain is fragmented, with many different groups buying medical supplies. The OHA helped design an inventory system to allow the province to track supplies such as N95 masks, surgical gloves, gowns, and face shields.
Mr. Dale admits at the beginning of the pandemic when the scale of the potential loss of life became clear, it was sometimes hard to keep his composure. When planning for worst-case scenarios, he had to consider things he never expected to face during his career, such as a document created by medical ethicists that outlined how doctors were going to decide which COVID-19 patients to prioritize if hospitals were overrun.
Thanks to declining COVID-19 rates, Mr. Dale can now focus his attention on how to support hospitals in resuming elective surgeries. He said many factors will go into the decision, such as PPE supplies and making sure there are enough beds available in case a second wave of COVID-19 hits.
At Queen’s, Mr. Dale studied politics and then earned a Master of Public Administration because he’s always been interested in how government and society worked together and how policy decisions are made. After graduation, he became a political staffer at Queen’s Park working for Elizabeth Witmer (Minister of Health and Long-Term Care and Minister of Labour) and Ontario Premier Michael Harris.
“The trajectory of what I learned in my undergrad and in graduate school, and my first work experiences, gives me a strong foundation for the work I do,” says Mr. Dale.
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