COVID-19 forces hospital to postpone surgeries

With COVID-19 on the verge of overwhelming the region's healthcare system, Windsor Regional Hospital is cancelling hundreds of surgeries.

The hospital announced the move last Friday in response to a rise in admissions of COVID-19 patients and a “potentially critical shortage of available acute care beds.”

“We're packed,” said hospital CEO David Musyj. “We're full, we've got no space. We've got to create immediate capacity.”

“We're at 90 per cent PRE-COVID occupancy, which is now 100 per cent during COVID occupancy because patients can't be doubled up in rooms.”

All scheduled procedures requiring an in-patient bed post-surgery will be postponed starting at 12:01 a.m. Monday. The hospital started reaching out to patients on Friday to fill them in.

Emergency surgeries will still go ahead when required. Cancer surgeries, OBGYN procedures and day surgeries will also not be cancelled. About 70 per cent of the hospital's procedures are day surgeries.

“That's a substantial amount of cases we're going to continue that we didn't do in the spring,” said Musyj. “We're going to continue day surgeries. We're going to continue some female surgeries, GYN, because they're on an isolated floor even though they get a bed. And we're going to continue with our ambulatory clinics, like fracture clinics.”

This is the second time the pandemic has forced the hospital to cancel surgeries. On March 19, the facility shut down operating rooms and cancelled non-urgent services including day surgeries.

That time, Musyj said about 80 surgeries were cancelled daily, totalling about 2,000 delayed procedures. They're still behind on 1,500 of them.

Musyj said the situation won't be as extreme this time, at least to start. About 20 cases a day will be postponed. Over a few months, he said that would add up to around 500 cases.

“We're trying to do it focusing on creating in-patient beds and hopefully not have to cancel day surgeries,” said Musyj.

The hospital is technically at 90 per cent capacity. But in reality, Musyj said the place is full because 50 beds are out of service.

“Fifty beds are out of service because we have to put COVID patients in single rooms,” he said. “We had to change a bunch of semi-private rooms to private, so we lost 50 beds.”

He said the surgery delays are “driven by critical care capacity.”

“Our biggest issue is the lack of critical care beds,” said Musyj. “We are two patients over at the Ouellette campus, meaning we put two ICU patients in a coronary care unit. So we're overflowed at the Ouellette campus and we have one bed at the Met campus. So we've got to save those beds for people who are really sick in the community that need ICU and/or COVID patients that need ICU.”

The hospital was caring for 30 COVID-19 patients on Friday. Nine of them were in the ICU.

“The natural progression is some of those 30 will need an ICU bed shortly,” said Musyj. “And the last thing we can afford, unfortunately, is someone getting a surgery done that everyone thinks is going to go normal, they're going to get a normal in-patient bed, it doesn't go well for the patient and they need an ICU bed.”

Windsor Regional heard at a Thursday night meeting that six COVID-19 patients had died in the hospital in the previous three days.

Windsor logged 111 new cases overnight. That brought the total number of active cases to 620.