Even as an outbreak of COVID-19 continues in the medicine unit, things are starting to look up at the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance.
CEO Lori Marshall says the COVID unit outbreak is over, and staff levels in ambulatory care are starting to return to normal.
“The reason why we had to scale back was because we had so many staff who were off or self-isolating as a precaution because of the outbreak,” Marshall explains. “Those staff have been able to come back to work, we only have a handful who remain off at this stage.”
Marshall says surgical services are also resuming back to normal levels.
“You’ll recall over a month ago, when we were running into difficulty in critical care, we needed to make the difficult decision about slowing down our surgical services so we could send some staff over to the ICU. With things abating there, what we’ve been able to do this week is also resume our normal surgical activity, which is terrific that we’re able to really care for all the needs in our community, not just specific ones.”
As it stands, there are currently 7 COVID positive patients in the Health Alliance, including one on a ventilator in the ICU.
Since the outbreak in the Medicine unit was declared on January 29th, 23 people including staff and patients have tested positive for the virus.
There were only two confirmed cases associated with the outbreak in the COVID unit, which was declared over on February 11th.