Surgeries at Chatham-Kent Health Alliance (CKHA) are slowly returning to normal.
CKHA CEO Lori Marshall said day surgery will resume soon and the number of surgical rooms in operation have increased from two to three this week and will increase to four next week. CKHA has a total of six operating rooms.
Marshall said the hospitals are currently in stage two, which allows them to ramp-up to 70 per cent of the surgical volume they were doing in 2019 before the pandemic.
"We are continuing to focus initially on day surgical procedures that don't have a bed requirement with them. Although, we are starting to add in more admitted elective cases coming into the hospital," said Marshall. "We certainly are following a very cautious and gradual return to surgeries recognizing that we continue to have a number of individuals who are admitted to hospital."
She added that hospital staff members that were redeployed during the recent surge of Omicron are returning to their home departments by the end of this week.
Marshall has previously said the surgical backlog at CKHA will take at least a year to resolve once operations get back to normal. She also said that unlike some other hospitals, no local urgent or emergency surgeries have been cancelled because of a shortage of beds.
The Chatham-Kent Health Alliance reported 19 COVID-19 patients in the Chatham hospital on Thursday with 10 of them being treated primarily for the virus. Hospital officials said there are four patients with COVID-19 in the ICU and two of them are being treated primarily for the virus. Eight of the 19 COVID-19 patients are not vaccinated and one is partially vaccinated.
