Thursday May 7, 2020 ~ BC
by Mary Brooke, B.Sc. ~ West Shore Voice News
As the Ministry of Health rapidly shifts gears to start doing more surgeries and catching up on the backlog of surgeries that was postponed as part of making hospital beds available for a potential influx of patients with COVID-19, a silver lining has emerged for the nursing sector.
Today Health Minister Adrian Dix said that all of this year’s 1,550 nursing graduates will be hired into the BC health-care system. And that more training will be made available to about 400 nurses who can upgrade to help where required.
Nurses may achieve various levels of qualification in BC including Licenced Practical Nurse (LPN), Registered Nurse (RN), Nurse Practitioner (NP), Registered Psychiatric Nurse (RPN), and Registered Nurse – Certified Practice (RNC)).
Catching up with surgeries after precautionary COVID-19 preparations:
Handling the backlog of surgeries will usher in Dix’s goal to handle more surgeries in any regard. He said today in a media teleconference that clearing the hospital capacity (beds, equipment, personnel and schedules) for a potential influx of COVID-19 cases resulted in the loss of all surgery catch-up that was achieved in 2018-2019.
During the March 16 to May 3 period, 24,000 surgeries were not added to surgery list (physicians not booking them in while the system was on pause). “COVID-19 wiped out the gains we’d made in recent years,” said Minister Dix.
But Dix feels that the pressure to deal with COVID-19 catchup now — with a $250 million price tag for the first year — will produce immediate and long-term benefits for the health system. Not the least of which, there will be more nurses on the job for patient care.
Changes to the scheduled surgeries process:
In ‘the new normal’, operating room hours (currently to 3 pm) will be extended to 5 or 6 pm on all days, and surgeries will also be made available on Saturdays and Sundays. And while operating room action usually slows down during the summer (for vacation time), this year will be different — surgeries will continue throughout the summer. “It’s a good opportunity for us to catch up,” said Dix.
About 15,000 elective surgeries are done each month normally. That slowed down since the March 16 suspension of elective/scheduled surgeries. For every 1,500 not done, that extends the timeline for half a month, Dix explained. He said that between March 16 and May 3 there were 17,308 surgeries completed (8,199 for emergency and 9,109 scheduled).
“It’s taking longer to do an overall surgical experience during COVID-19, given more time for patient screening, more time to fully attend to personal protection equipment (PPE) and other preparations for health-care staff, as well as more complex or regulated schedules.
Has the surgery suspension been worth it?
Minister Dix says the suspension of surgeries was in response to seeing what was happening in places like Italy and New York City where hospital capacity was inadequate to handle an influx of COVID-19 patients. He says the decision to suspend surgeries was — in that context — very much worth it.
Dix for many weeks in March and April gave tallies of the number of available hospital beds for any surge in COVID-19 case, as well as the number of ventilators available in various locations.
However, it could be argued that a more careful analysis of a comparison to Italy and New York City might have revealed those ‘unique’ aspects of BC that Provincial Health Officer Dr Bonnie Henry often cites as part of “our own pandemic” in BC. For example, in both Italy and New York City there was a much higher population density and much higher air pollution levels than in BC, and Italy in particular had a much older population per capita than we have in BC. COVID-19 is known to attack the lungs (and therefore initial air quality factors are a key factor) and to attack people over 50 or 60 more than younger people.
Dix has the Premier’s backing & Dr Henry’s support:
Minister Dix said the health-care system has been busy (with both COVID-19 and regular services) but that there’s been an impact on patients. Now it is “impossible to catch up without significant program changes and capacity”, said Dix today.
Premier John Horgan shared the media briefing session podium today with Dix, as well as Provincial Health Officer Dr Bonnie Henry. They all addressed various aspects of this big and unexpected impact on the health care system.
Dr Henry said that “now that we have flattened our curve, we need to take a different approach to this”. She says every person who has COVID-19 has been identified, and that “helps us understand where transmission is occurring”.
“We no longer have to assume that everybody has this (COVID-10 disease),” said Dr Henry. “We can assume that most patients do not have COVID-19,” which allows the system for surgeries to be “a little more streamlined”.