AHS urges patience as some elective surgeries resume
Alberta Health Services is using a new system to reschedule non-urgent and elective surgeries delayed because of the COVID -19 pandemic.
AHS vice-president Mark Joffe said the province anticipates returning to 70 to 80 per cent of its regular outpatient surgical volume in the next six weeks, after announcing May 4 that more surgeries would resume. Alberta has been operating around 40 per cent of typical capacity since March 18, when all the province’s elective surgeries were postponed to ensure Alberta would have enough free hospital beds to weather the novel coronavirus outbreak.
A “centralized triage system” has now been introduced to help bring Albertans back under the knife.
“It allows us to assess all patients who are waiting and how long they’ve been waiting and how urgent their surgery is, so we can prioritize those who have been waiting the longest and require surgery the most urgently,” Joffe said.
The system also pairs up wait-listed patients with potential surgeons, even if that doctor was not the one originally scheduled to perform the surgery — something Joffe says can help further fasttrack procedures.
For many Albertans awaiting surgeries, the pandemic extended already long waits for procedures. Russ Bender of Calgary had a knee surgery scheduled for March 23 that was postponed with less than a week’s notice. He had been waiting for the surgery since January 2019.
Bender has yet to be contacted with information about a new date. He wants to see an even more dramatic approach to easing Alberta’s backlog of surgeries.
“There is this group of us out there that are waiting. And, having said that, we have a lot of empty beds, and I know these beds are targeted for acute care, coronavirus, but they’re not even being used,” he said. “We’ve been reasonably successful so I’m not sure where this is all going.”
Joffe said it will take “a while” for AHS to reschedule everyone and added the province is currently only offering day procedures, with conversations starting on resuming procedures that require overnight stays.
“Individuals who thought they were having their procedure in the last six weeks or the six weeks to come may have had their surgery bumped, and we appreciate that there is a lot of anxiety and aggravation around that,” he said.
“We knew that to respond to this pandemic it was absolutely critical that we free up capacity in our hospitals and in our intensive-care units. It was absolutely necessary. We apologize for Albertans that have had to have additional suffering because of all this.”
Joffe also emphasized that emergency surgeries and urgent procedures, such as those for cancer patients, have been continuing through the pandemic.
As of Saturday, there were 60 Albertans in hospital with COVID -19, eight of whom were in ICU — the lowest number of concurrent coronavirus-related intensive-care admissions since March 25. The province has 1,081 ICU spaces.
Bender said he feels frustrated by the lack of communication he’s seen from AHS on surgeries.
“I only have so much time left so I want to live it with vitality, not just sit around on my ass, and there’s a lot of us like that,” Bender said.
“Don’t leave us in the dark. It’s sort of like we’re being ignored.”