Home / Resources / Position Statements and Guidelines

Sars - Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

Public Health Guidelines

CAEP Emergency Department SARS Guidelines

  • Guidelines for Managing Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Canadian Emergency Departments
  • Health Canada's guidelines at www.sars.gc.ca provide critically important principles on which to base practice, but do not provide specific guidance on many ED issues. We used those guidelines and the experience of Emergency Physicians who have been at the center of the SARS outbreak to recommend best practices for Canadian Emergency Departments. These guidelines should enable EDs throughout Canada to develop procedures most appropriate for their local circumstances.

Message For People Outside our Emergency Departments:
A Patient with SARS is Not Like a Patient with a Heart Attack

  • A patient with a heart attack does not contaminate other patients, health care workers, equipment, toilets, curtains, walls and floors with a potentially lethal agent like the SARS virus. A patient having a heart attack can be brought through a crowded ED waiting room with friends and family, talk in person to a triage nurse, and then be placed in an ED treatment bed without causing the huge risks to other people that a patient infected with SARS could cause.
  • A SARS patient who walks through a crowded ED waiting room and ends up being resuscitated in an open suite can contaminate other patients, staff, equipment and hospital surfaces. Because there is no way of knowing if anyone was infected, then everyone in the vicinity of the patient might have to be quarantined for 10 days. Most EDs can ill afford to have nurses and physicians sent home for 10 days, and most Canadian communities cannot afford to have their hospitals closed or partially closed by such an event. The spillover impacts in terms of lost staff, psychological stress and closed facilitates can be disastrous. If the staff members also work in other hospitals, then the impact extends to those communities too.
  • If a community's response to SARS is not managed properly, a single critically ill patient with SARS can close down the community's Emergency Department and hospital.

We have to be able to cope with the SARS problem effectively by ensuring that our Emergency Departments and hospitals can continue to provide care to all the patients who will continue to suffer emergencies other than SARS. And our nurses, physicians and support staff need to be able to work in the SARS world with minimal additional stress. SARS precautions can impose very high stress.

Too little precaution can lead to health care workers ill with SARS. Too much precaution can lead to health care workers disabled by stress.

Please Complete This Online Survey About SARS in Your ED

The survey only takes 5-10 minutes of your time:
http://dfcm19.med.utoronto.ca/surveys/sars/default.asp

The recent outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) across Canada has had a dramatic impact on the delivery of health care services in some jurisdictions. Emergency physicians are front line workers who have been, and continue to be exposed to SARS and potential SARS patients on a daily basis. This has caused considerable anxiety in some members of our profession. This survey is intended to gauge the impact of this epidemic on your professional and personal life, as well as provide some insight into the response of your hospital, and its state of preparedness for the potential spread of SARS.

This survey should not take more than 5-10 minutes to complete. Your honest and timely response to this survey is deeply appreciated. Your responses will be automatically placed into an excel spreadsheet in order to speed up data entry and facilitate data analysis. All responses will remain strictly confidential: Return e-mail addresses will be stripped from the responses by the survey administrator (Iva Berlekovic at the Department of Family and Community Medicine Office at the University of Toronto), and under NO circumstances will this information be made available to the investigator or any other individual. If you have specific questions or comments regarding this survey, you can send them to me atb.borgundvaag@utoronto.ca

We intend to publish the results of this survey as soon as possible in order to share this information with the emergency medicine community at large. We anticipate that the results of this survey will be useful to governing bodies and organizations for educating and preparing our membership for the possibility of expansion of this epidemic.

Remain Current with Colleagues: Join CAEP's Email Discussion Lists

  • EmergCanada 
    email list to share ideas with colleagues (public discussion, open to all).
  • EDChiefsCanada
    email list to share ideas with Canadian ED physician administrators (restricted membership).

CAEP SARS Task Force Members

  • Jim Thompson MD, Chair - SARS Task Force
    jim2@jimthompson.net 
    Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
  • François Bélanger MD
    Alberta Childrens' Hospital, Calgary, Alberta
  • Bruno Bernardin MD
    Montreal General Hospital, Montreal, Quebec
  • Bjug Borgundvaag MD
    Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Ontario
  • Jonathan Dreyer MD
    London Health Sciences Centre, London, Ontario
  • Robert Drummond MD
    St. Mary's Hospital Centre, Montréal, Quebec
  • Eric Grafstein MD
    St. Paul's Hospital, Vancouver, British Columbia
  • Brian R. Holroyd MD
    University of Alberta Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta
  • Atul Kapur MD
    Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus, Ottawa, Ontario
  • Howard Ovens MD
    Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Ontario
    (CAEP representative to Health Canada Sars Clinical Working Group)
  • Wes Palatnick MD
    Health Sciences Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba
  • Doug Sinclair MD
    Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Center, Halifax, Nova Scotia
  • Steven Socransky MD
    St. Joseph's HC - Sudbury Regional Hospital, Sudbury, Ontario
  • Lorne M. Wiesenfeld MD
    Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus, Ottawa, Ontario
  • Colin Zides MD
    Niagara Health System/Welland Hosptial Site, Welland, Ontario
  • Sue Norrington
    Administrator - CAEP, Ottawa, Ontario
  • Simone White
    Public Affairs Admin. Assistant CAEP, Ottawa, Ontario

Upcoming Events

  • CAEP 2012
    June 2 - June 6, 2012
    Niagara Falls, ON

Roadshows