Latest news with #StPaulsHospital
CBC
29-06-2025
- Health
- CBC
Saskatoon City Hospital increases hours for emergency department
The Saskatoon City Hospital is increasing the hours of operation for its emergency department from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The new schedule begins June 29. It follows several months of reduced hours at the emergency department, which was only operational from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The hospital says the hours have expanded because the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) has made progress in stabilizing physician staffing, and is now taking a "phased approach" to resuming full-time hours. The introduction of 109 new acute care beds at the hospital is also still underway. The initiative, funded by an SHA infusion of $15 million, began in March 2025 and is expected to take 12 to 16 months. Understaffing has been a persistent issue at Saskatoon hospitals. On New Year's Eve 2024, the emergency department temporarily reduced its hours to just 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., saying some of its doctors were sick. In May 2025, emergency room patients at the Royal University Hospital and St. Paul's Hospital were forced to be treated in hallways and waiting rooms due to lack of available space. Alongside the increased hours at the Saskatoon City Hospital, the emergency departments at the Royal University Hospital and St Paul's Hospital remain open to the public 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Saskatoon City Hospital increases hours for emergency department
The Saskatoon City Hospital is increasing the hours of operation for its emergency department from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The new schedule begins June 29. It follows several months of reduced hours at the emergency department, which was only operational from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The hospital says the hours have expanded because the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) has made progress in stabilizing physician staffing, and is now taking a "phased approach" to resuming full-time hours. The introduction of 109 new acute care beds at the hospital is also still underway. The initiative, funded by an SHA infusion of $15 million, began in March 2025 and is expected to take 12 to 16 months. Understaffing has been a persistent issue at Saskatoon hospitals. On New Year's Eve 2024, the emergency department temporarily reduced its hours to just 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., saying some of its doctors were sick. In May 2025, emergency room patients at the Royal University Hospital and St. Paul's Hospital were forced to be treated in hallways and waiting rooms due to lack of available space. Alongside the increased hours at the Saskatoon City Hospital, the emergency departments at the Royal University Hospital and St Paul's Hospital remain open to the public 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
CTV News
23-06-2025
- CTV News
Saskatoon boy, 13, in hospital with life-threatening gunshot wound: police
A 13-year-old Saskatoon boy is being treated for a life-threatening gunshot wound after being dropped off at the hospital early Saturday morning, police say. Police were called to St. Paul's Hospital in the city's west side just before 5 a.m. on Saturday, after the boy was reportedly dropped off at the emergency room suffering from a gunshot wound. Investigators believe the shooting may have occurred somewhere in the 400 block of Avenue W South. Anyone with information is asked to call police or Crime Stoppers.
Medscape
19-06-2025
- Health
- Medscape
Symptoms and Severity of CAD Don't Always Match
The severity of a patient's symptoms of coronary artery disease are not always a reliable indicator of the extent of atherosclerosis, according to a new study in JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging . Jonathon Leipsic, MD 'There's been a reliance on stenosis severity as a predictor of the likelihood of having symptoms, but that relationship is known to be inconsistent,' said Jonathon Leipsic, MD, a cardiologist at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, who led the study. 'I think far too often clinicians have assumed in the absence of a focal lesion, the symptoms must be related to the microcirculation.' Leipsic and his colleagues used new artificial intelligence-enabled tools to quantify the amount of plaque in a patient's arteries and functional indices such as fractional flow reserve-CT (FFR-CT) and compare them to their reported symptoms. The study used the ADVANCE registry, a study on the impact of FFR-CT on clinical decision-making. They analyzed 4382 patients in the registry — 1079 with no symptoms, 438 with dyspnea, 277 with noncardiac chest pain, 1621 with atypical chest pain, and 967 with typical angina. The amount of plaque was quantified using total percentage atheroma volume (TPAV) and the significance of stenosis was measured using FFR-CT. The analysis showed that the presence or absence of symptoms was not independently associated with either TPAV or FFR-CT. When the various symptoms were examined individually, some associations emerged. For patients with typical angina — constricting discomfort in the chest, neck, jaw, shoulder, or arm brought on by physical exertion and relieved by rest or nitrates — the relationship between symptoms and plaque was clear: They tended to have higher TPAV and a lower, and therefore abnormal, FFR-CT. But atypical chest pain, noncardiac chest pain, and dyspnea were not associated, or even inversely associated, with TPAV and FFR-CT. 'While you would think there is a relationship between symptoms and plaque, the symptom status was not terribly predictive of the amount of disease,' Leipsic said. Even having no symptoms was not a reliable indicator of cardiovascular health in these patients. 'Just because a patient doesn't report any symptoms doesn't mean there is no atherosclerosis,' he said. Matthew Budoff, MD, a cardiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said cardiologists rely heavily on symptoms to determine how severe cardiovascular disease is, but the new research is beginning to dispel that idea. 'We can't totally rely on symptoms to determine what the next step for that patient would be,' he said. Budoff said the new findings support the idea CT angiography should be a bigger part of the diagnostic process, so clinicians can look not only at whether a patient has stenosis but also go beyond to see if they have any atherosclerosis or plaque that might be a target for medical therapy. The 2021 clinical guidelines on chest pain from the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology are already moving toward using CT as a first approach to untangle the differences between symptoms, plaque, and stenosis, he added. 'Trying to unravel the plaque severity in somebody who comes in without typical symptoms may be very helpful for our diagnostic algorithms,' he said. Budoff reported no relevant financial conflicts of interest. Leipsic reported receiving support from and consulting to HeartFlow and CircleCVI; and stock options in HeartFlow and Circle CVI.
Medscape
17-06-2025
- Health
- Medscape
Alzheimer's Disease Leaves Signature in Blood and CSF
OTTAWA, Ontario — Looking for Alzheimer's disease (AD) biomarkers in plasma instead of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is a simpler form of screening individuals for AD pathology and could result in earlier delivery of anti-amyloid therapies to symptomatic individuals, according to Mari DeMarco, PhD, clinical chemist at St. Paul's Hospital and clinical professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of British Columbia, both in Vancouver. Obtaining blood to detect biomarkers of AD is less invasive than obtaining CSF, DeMarco said during a presentation at the Canadian Neurological Sciences Federation Congress 2025. 'We know from decades of research that this pathology leaves a signature behind in CSF,' she said. 'We now know that it also leaves a signature behind in blood.' One AD biomarker that is more easily identified than others in plasma is phosphorylated tau 217, noted DeMarco. Biomarker identification has undergone many advances, such as the development of mass spectrometry. 'With CSF, those early assays had high variability and questionable accuracy,' said DeMarco. 'There was a big push in the field to develop accurate assays, which led to mass spectrometry. That is the gold standard.' One of the difficulties of analyzing biomarkers in plasma is the need for careful collection and care of samples. 'Getting them [plasma samples] to the analyzer in a safe and proper way so that we can accurately quantify [biomarkers] can be a challenge,' said DeMarco. The long-term stability of the plasma biomarkers in storage, which affects their diagnostic accuracy, is another potential concern, she added. Identifying biomarkers in CSF requires lumbar punctures, and using a blood test would increase the accessibility of screening for AD pathology. De Marco nevertheless called for caution about making plasma biomarker testing widely available in primary care. 'If you are getting testing to confirm that you have the pathology associated with AD for the purpose of getting an anti-amyloid therapy, then the person ordering the test should probably be the one who is going to help manage the patient,' DeMarco told Medscape Medical News . A hybrid model of AD care that involves primary care physicians and specialists may be the solution to incorporating blood biomarkers in clinical practice, she added. Plasma biomarkers may have a negative predictive value to rule out AD, as well as a positive predictive value, said De Marco. Depending on the test result, confirmatory testing may be needed in the form of another blood test, CSF test, or PET scan. Pardh Chivukula, MD, a neurologist at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto and vice president of the Canadian Neurological Society in Calgary, suggested that it might be beneficial to healthcare delivery in Canada if, in a few years, patients could be triaged in primary care through testing for AD biomarkers in plasma. The appropriate patients could be referred to specialist care. 'The field is still very early on in development,' said Chivukula told Medscape Medical News . 'That's certainly a good goal for us to have in the future. And I think potentially it can streamline the efficiency of our healthcare system if we can use these biomarkers to screen for which patients are a higher risk, or more likely to have these conditions, using simple blood tests.'
