Guelph General Hospital is pulling the brakes on non-emergency surgeries to make sure there is room available as COVID cases soar in the province.
Right now, all 10 beds in Guelph General Hospital’s ICU are full and just under half of those are occupied by COVID patients.
“We are ramping down our elective surgeries. We're only going to be going forward with our emergency and urgent cases,” said Melissa Skinner, vice-president and chief nursing executive at the GGH.
“Obviously it's not a decision that Ontario Health has taken lightly. We know that there's a lot of people in our community who are eager to get their surgeries done but right now we need to protect our ICUs but also our critical care within the hospital and we need to be ready.”
Skinner said the hospital was told to take this approach by the province on Friday and that’s when it started to reach out to patients to inform them of their cancelled surgeries.
Skinner said patients with cancelled surgeries will be contacted by their doctor’s offices by next week if they haven’t already. Examples of emergency surgeries that will continue include cancer surgeries,vascular surgeries and treatment for emergency fractures.
Skinner said the ICU unit has been full on and off for the past month.If a patient in the hospital needs to be put into the ICU when its full, the hospital has a surge plan where it will hold the patient in the post anesthetic care unit
“We know that we can take two more patients without any problem into that area,” said Skinner adding that the hospital often holds patients in the post anesthetic care unit when the ICU is full.
“As our surgeries start to ramp down, we know that we may have to look after more ICU patients in that post anesthetic care unit,” said Skinner.
The hospital has two ICU areas based on the level of care needed. Level 2 ICU has 13 beds and Level 3 ICU has 10 beds. COVID patients stay in Level 3 ICU.
Skinner explained that every morning, the critical care units across the province assess how they're doing and as a team, they make decisions such as where critical care patients need to be transferred.
“Now for the first time, we’re doing that for other patients outside of critical care,” said Skinner.
Skinner said normally GGH works with other hospitals in the region such as Cambridge Memorial Hospital, Grand River Hospital and St. Mary's General Hospital but is now working as a team with hospitals across the province.
“We are all getting ready to help our partners in the GTA and wherever the pressure points are in the province, all the other hospitals are expected to help out and support. So we're getting ready to help patients out of our region.
Nearly a year ago when the pandemic hit in March, the GGH cancelled non-emergency surgeries as directed by the province from March to June.
“It took several months for us to start to ramp back up.”
Skinner said with experiencing the lock down and cancelled surgeries last year, the hospital learned many lessons.
“We feel much more prepared this time,” said Skinner.
“And now it's really important now more than ever that all the hospitals work together as a team and we all support each other. We know that if something were to happen here, our partners would support us as well.”
