Health officials in Chatham-Kent are bracing for a potential second wave of COVID-19.
Health Alliance CEO Lori Marshall says the hospital is reviewing its assessment centre and preparing for an influx of testing.
“We’ve expanded the number of rooms that we’re able to use in the assessment centre that we have so that we’re better able to respond in that instance,” Marshall says. “We’re looking at the online booking as being the major way to help manage volumes, as opposed to people standing in line for hours waiting and then being turned away, which is what we’re seeing in other places.”
The hospital is also looking at opening a second assessment centre, or one larger facility to handle the volume.
Meantime as far as services go in the hospital itself, Marshall says they’re using lessons learned from the start of the pandemic to help prepare.
“We would have to do some things like we did the first time round, in terms of making sure we’re helping to move patients appropriately to long term care or to home, making sure we have that availability of beds, and the potential to actually move back a little bit on elective surgeries again, if we had to.”
Marshall says they’ve also been getting feedback from staff on what worked well the first time around and what could have been done better.
