Health Alliance officials are hopeful the end is near when it comes to the COVID outbreak in the hospital’s Medicine Unit.
A total of 12 COVID cases have been linked to the Medicine Unit outbreak, which was first declared on May 11th. A man in his 70s died as a result of the COVID outbreak earlier this week.
CEO Lori Marshall is hopeful Public Health will declare the outbreak over as early as tomorrow.
“Our staff have done amazing things over the course of the pandemic whenever something like this occurs and we have to think differently about where beds are in the organization, who has access to the different beds, because you can’t admit to an outbreak unit,” Marshall explains. “It really involves everybody from housekeeping and admitting to our IT services through to all of our clinical staff.”
Marshall says with the hospital beds reaching critical capacity, being able to open up more beds in the medicine unit couldn’t come at a better time.
“The province allowed us to start doing elective surgeries again, and so as of May 25th we’re doing day surgeries and outpatient surgeries, and we anticipate that in the next week or so, we’ll be hearing that we’ll be able to start doing admitted elective surgeries again. Really we need our capacity back in order to move in that direction.”
As of Wednesday morning, the ICU at CKHA is listed as 120% full, while the medical, surgical, and critical care beds are sitting just over 100% occupancy. Both units are currently using overflow beds to deal with the extra capacity.