While response to the COVID-19 pandemic has dominated the efforts of the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit (SDMHU) for the past two years, the health unit continues to provide other vital services to the communities it serves. In its annual report for 2020-2021, released last week, Medical Director of Health, Dr. Charles Gardner says the health unit’s response to COVID officially began on January 24, 2020 with activation of the Incident Management System. On March 11, 2020, the same day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the first case was confirmed in Simcoe County. By April 2020, the health unit had paused most routine programming and begun re-deploying staff to pandemic related work including surveillance, communications, contact management and eventually mass vaccination.
Other crucial services including Substance Use and Injury Prevention, Healthy Growth and Development, Infectious Diseases and Environmental Health programs continued in the background. One important initiative of the Health Unit is the Healthy Babies / Healthy Children program which provides counselling, education and program referrals for vulnerable parents and caregivers. Throughout the pandemic, family visits were conducted virtually, outdoors, and where possible indoors with public health measures in place. The program continued to provide phone support for parenting and infant feeding calls, telephone and home visits for postpartum support and online prenatal and breastfeeding classes.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, SMDHU has handled nearly 66,000 inquiries to Health Connection phone lines, investigated 118 confirmed outbreaks, and added 39 new staff for COVID-19 specific roles.