PREPARING FOR INFLUX
Hospitals scaling back surgeries
Windsor Regional Hospital is shutting down operating rooms, cancelling non-urgent services and calling in retired doctors and nurses to prepare for a “wave” of COVID-19 cases.
Starting Thursday, the hospital will go from 17 operating rooms across both campuses down to six, which means 600 to 700 patients a week won’t get their surgeries. Windsor Regional is also preparing for a possible influx of patients from other regions where the health-care system could be overwhelmed.
“Right now we’re planning for the worst and making sure that we’re ready for anything that comes through our doors, again not just locally but provincially,” said Dr. Wassim Saad, the hospital’s chief of staff. “And this is not going to be a one- or two-week problem. This is a six, seven-week or several-months problem.”
Saad said all Ontario hospitals have received a directive from the Ministry of Health to “ramp down” elective procedures as the province grapples with the outbreak of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.
Erie Shores Healthcare in Leamington
is also suspending elective surgeries and other non-emergency procedures.
“We must prepare ourselves with a proactive approach to COVID -19 by finding capacity in our healthcare system for patients,” said Janice Dawson, CEO of Erie Shores Healthcare.
Most of the temporary closures and postponements take effect at 12:01 a.m. Thursday. Patients will be contacted.
Cancelling the non-urgent surgeries will free up about 150 beds.
“They may not be just for our local patients,” said Saad. “We may need to care for patients across the province who may need those beds.”
The list of cancelled procedures and services is wide-ranging.
“It’s ambulatory clinics,” said Saad. “It’s endoscopic evaluation. It could be diagnostic tests for radiology procedures, and it’s elective ORS. This is going to have a huge impact on health care everywhere. But again, our biggest crisis right now is dealing with the COVID -19 spread. We need to contain that spread and we need to be ready to care for patients who are infected with it.”
The cancellations are already causing concern, and pain, for some people. Kayla Prieur Jeffrey, a patient at the pain management clinic, said she recently received a call telling her all appointments are cancelled.
“I currently have no pain management doctor,” said Jeffrey, 30, who has complex regional pain syndrome. “I’m living my life in agony.”
Saad said he understands people will be affected by the new measures, but added the cancellations are necessary.
“That would be considered elective,” he said of the pain management centre. “I don’t think that is an essential service. Obviously it’s very important for patients but it’s not considered essential to the operations of the hospital and in terms of creating capacity for a possible influx of patients.”
The new measures are aimed at saving hospital resources for the “most urgent needs,” according to Saad.
“We’re trying to learn from the experience in Europe, particularly in Spain and Italy, as to what happened with their health care when the capacity hit,” he said. “They didn’t have enough capacity and the health-care system suffered because of it. Learning from that experience, the Ontario government is trying to create as many beds as possible and as much capacity as possible so that if and when this wave of patients who we expect to be sick with COVID-19 hits, we’ll have the ability to care for them.”
To help handle the expected spike of infected people, Saad said retired personnel have been signing up to put their scrubs back on.
“As we’re preparing for that wave to hit, it’s all hands on deck,” said Saad. “We have retired nurses, retired physicians. Yesterday there was a retired staff member that came out of retirement and joined us in the command centre. It’s impressive to see people that are willing to help out and come out of retirement and put themselves on the front lines to be able to help.”
He said the hospital has yet to sort out how it will handle the backlog in procedures when the emergency measures are lifted.
“What are we going to do three months, six months from now with all those elective procedures and what the backlog’s going to be? I don’t know,” said Saad. “But I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Right now we’re dealing with the emergency that we have.”