Hospitals and emergency rooms nation-wide have been dealing with COVID-19 for a couple of months now, and trying to keep staff and patients safe.
But now the unintended consequences and hardships of all the protective measures are being noticed.
Quinte Health Care Executive Director Mary Clare Egberts told Quinte News there have been many unforeseen issues that have come up.
One major one is the number of elective surgeries that are being put off to protect people, but Egberts says eventually those surgeries are no longer elective.
She says they are now looking into ensuring they aren’t putting anyone’s health at risk by keeping them out of the hospital but at the same time awaiting direction from the Ministry of Health before they can add back any elective services.
Another unintended consequence is the lack of visitors allowed to see patients.
Egberts says they even made the decision to not allow staff to see family or friends who are in the hospital to help limit contact.
She says it was very hard for staff and management to not only make that decision but now to follow through with that.
They are however allowing visitors under very specific circumstances.
Egberts says if someone is very sick, don’t delay coming to the emergency department.
In terms of patient volumes, she says some days their emergency room is seeing less than half the normal number of patients in the emergency room at Belleville General, with some days reaching 70-80% of patient volume.
Egberts says she knows there are a number of people who need to come to the emergency department and it is still safe for them to come in as they have effective infection control procedures in place. They also have the ability to separate the patients who potentially have COVID-19, or are suspected of having it, from those who have other illnesses.
On the bright side, the hospitals aren’t dealing with influenza right now, but Egberts says many people in the Quinte region have a respiratory infection that has similar symptoms to that of COVID-19.
Egberts says the community has been great at taking the need to physically distance to heart and the number of positive cases in our region is quite low, but says that means not many people are developing an immunity to the virus.
She says we need to continue to use the best hand hygiene as there are likely going to be future waves of the virus, meaning we need to keep our guard up and remain diligent.
