Things are beginning to return to business as usual at the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit.
Members of County of Simcoe council received a brief update from the local board of health earlier this week, including how the COVID-19 pandemic was managed over the last three years, as well as current efforts to get things back to normal.
The health unit approved a new strategic plan last week, noted medical officer of health, Dr. Charles Gardner, who was joined by board chair Ann-Marie Kungl and vice-chair Scott Warnock at the meeting.
Gardner said both the health unit’s vision and mission remains the same.
“The strategic plan otherwise replaces a recovery plan that we’ve had underway for the last two years,” he explained.
“Through the pandemic we became very high profile in response to that health emergency … and that is certainly a big part of our mandate, vaccinations and response to outbreaks and emergencies," Gardner added. "We work very closely with municipalities on a number of the programs we provide, including general emergency community response and emergency preparedness.”
Gardner listed the many ways the local health unit works to prevent chronic disease, as well as its role in the surveillance and reporting of the health status of the community.
“We are coming out of — touch on wood — the most severe pandemic of the century. Sadly, we lost more than 16,000 people in this province from the pandemic, but according to the (province’s) chief medical officer of health’s report on the pandemic, if we’d not all … worked together and did all we did we probably would have had 20 times that mortality," he said.
Simcoe County achieved an 80 per cent vaccination rate against the virus, said Gardner, which helped reduce the mortality rate locally.
Throughout the last three years, the health unit had to maintain some of its regular programming, he added, however the majority of staff were redeployed during the response.
“Certain things simply couldn’t stop … including things like responding to animal bites, continuing to respond to the opioid crisis,” Gardner cited as examples.
This recovery plan has been in the works for two years, but it has been a challenge to get it underway, he acknowledged, adding it has only been since January 2023 that the many health unit staff have been able to return back to their normal programming roles.
“This framework is actually being replaced as of last Wednesday with a new strategic plan … but it builds on the recovery framework and has a focus on program recovery, people recovery, partnership recovery and renewal and looking to the future and making the case for the resources needed to the province," Gardner said.
The doctor also highlighted a few things that the Simcoe-Muskoka health unit is getting back underway, including its routine immunization program, which he said will likely take them into next year to achieve.
Simcoe County Warden Basil Clarke, who is also the mayor of Ramara Township, was curious how the statistics for the recent year look for the “plain old flu shot.”
“I think we have experienced some degree of vaccination fatigue," Gardner said. "After all, there are some people in the community for whom this would be their sixth dose of COVID (vaccine) at this time. With that, there was perhaps some reduction in the uptake of influenza vaccination last year. We will see what happens in the fall … (but) we did have a resurgence of influenza and RSV. We will do what we can to promote it and other vaccinations.”
Being on the board of health during a pandemic is “not for the faint of heart," acknowledged Innisfil Mayor Lynn Dolin, adding she appreciated the “calm and confident” leadership provided by Gardner and the senior leadership team at the local health unit.
“Through some pretty personal threats from people, we were quite concerned," she said. "It’s always the messenger that gets the brunt of it. But all through a calm and steady hand on the wheel all throughout it. Had we not had that, we would have been in much worse shape.”
