Niagara Health begins to plan to resume elective surgeries
Hospital is waiting for guidance from Ontario officials before moving forward
As Niagara Health starts to “ramp up again,” it will take “some time” to get back to a normal surgical schedule, said Derek McNally, Niagara Health’s executive vice-president and chief nursing executive.
He said there are many factors that will have to be considered before elective surgeries, which Niagara Health made the “difficult decision” to postpone in mid-March, will resume.
“For safety reasons, all hospitals, including Niagara Health, were told to postpone surgical procedures because of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said McNally.
“We did continue to perform emergency and urgent surgeries. We have an executive committee of our surgical program that meets on a weekly basis to determine the cases that are on the list for urgent and emergent, and also new cases that have come on the list to look at the priorities for those cases.
“Each case is reviewed, and cases are re-prioritized if new care plans are required to be developed, and if patients’ conditions change.”
“We’ll need to re-introduce services because there is a large number of patients whose surgeries have been postponed, and so we’ll have to really take a good look at what does that look like as we start to ramp up,” he said. “We’ve actually started some preliminary planning, and we’re expecting more provincial guidance on this.”
McNally said before certain procedures resume, Niagara Health officials will have to consider many factors, including whether it has a “low disease burden of COVID-19,” whether it has a stable rate of COVID-19 cases within its organization, whether it has a stable supply of personal protective equipment, and whether it has a stable supply of medications for allocation for additional surgeries.
He said officials will also have to look at the capacity of its intensive-care units “because some of our major surgeries, the patients would be required to go to intensive care after their surgery.”
McNally said the Niagara Health Foundation has been successful in securing many “generous” donations from local businesses and organizations during the pandemic, which have helped them obtain necessary personal protective equipment such as masks and gowns.
He said Niagara Health is “OK right now” when it comes to its supply.
“Every day, we have a virtual emergency operations centre meeting where we discuss a number of key things — one of them is the amount of PPE available on that day and going forward, and then planning for future needs.
“We have a fantastic logistics team who’s consistently, every day, on top of that.”
Visits to Niagara’s three emergency departments and two urgent-care centres are down between 40 to 50 per cent during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think across the entire province, the numbers have gone down and specifically for Niagara Health … we’ve seen a significant decrease in the volumes — we’ve decreased anything from 40 to 50 per cent, dependent on the day,” said McNally.
He said he’s not exactly sure why volumes are down at emergency rooms in St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Welland, and urgent-care centres in Port Colborne and Fort Erie.
McNally said he encourages anyone with concerns about their health to contact either their physician directly, or if it’s an emergency, to call 911 and go to an emergency department.