The Chatham-Kent Health Alliance is working towards reducing a fairly sizable backlog of surgeries.
CEO Lori Marshall says because of several factors, not only the pandemic, the hospital has done 2000 fewer operations this year compared to the same time a year ago.
“A few significant instances where we’ve had to pull back significantly on our surgical program,” Marshall explains. “The first was during the (pandemic’s) first wave, the second was we briefly had a planned slowdown for a short period of time when we implemented our Cerner (computer) system, and then the third was when we had to redeploy staff from the OR into our ICU to support the increase in patients we saw there.”
By the end of this fiscal year, March 31, 2021, the Health Alliance will have performed 2000 fewer surgeries compared to last year.
Marshall says general surgeries in almost every department were affected by the delays.
“That would include things like orthopedic cases, hip or knee replacement, it would include cataracts, it would include general surgery cases like hernias, it really is all of our services.”
Plans are in the works to clear the surgeries left waiting in the wings.
“We will be hearing in the near term about a new operating room that will be expanding, this is related to our urology services,” Marshall explains. “We are actively recruiting anesthetists and surgical nurses, OR nurses, so that we can respond to what we believe is the need to increase our services in order to deal with that backlog.”