The COVID-19 pandemic continues to put strain on hospitals and Quinte Health Care is no different.
President and CEO Stacey Daub, Dr. Colin McPherson and Vice-President of People and Strategy Susan Rowe provided an update on QHC operations Tuesday morning.
Of the six waves of the pandemic, the latter three have been much harder on the region.
Daub says it’s been a continuous assault by the virus over the last sixth months.
“So in the first three waves, we saw about 400 people in our emergency department and the last three waves from November to now, we’ve seen 1,300 people. In the first three waves from an in-patient perspective we saw 73 patients who had COVID. In the last three waves we’ve seen 500 people in our in-patient units.”
“It may mean that we have to look at making temporary changes that enable us to provide better and faster access to services. It may mean that we need to help people get services elsewhere. So, for example we may need a colleague hospital somewhere in the east who may have better access to a service.”
“Pre-pandemic, about 15% of our population was exceeding wait times and now we’re up to 24%. And we are still, comparatively, doing quite well around surgical wait times. Twenty-four per cent is still unacceptable from our perspective, but, comparatively, we are making good progress.”
Daub says many more people are still waiting to see a primary care physician and get diagnostic imaging just to get into the queue for a surgery.
A national shortage of anesthetists is also limiting the number of surgeries and has resulted in some cancellations.
Still, Daub is extremely proud of how their four hospitals have continued to operate and commends staff for their continued efforts through these difficult times.
