If you have been waiting to have a procedure at Windsor Regional Hospital, you might have to wait even longer.
Stressing that it is to save lives across Ontario, Windsor Regional Hospital CEO David Musyj announced all non-urgent and elective surgeries will be postponed as of 12:01 a.m. Monday.
Windsor Regional Hospital president and CEO David Musyj speaks with reporters on March 5, 2020. Photo by Mark Brown/Blackburn News.
"Please recognize, this is the best interest of our society," he said, addressing those who have had to wait for surgeries.
Friday's announcement did not include cancer and emergency surgeries. Chief of Staff Doctor Wassim Saad reassured the public those would go ahead as scheduled.
"I'm also warning everybody that that could change at any moment," he said. "If we get direction again that we need the beds, we need the human health resources, we need something to help out the province or even our own residents, then those may have to cancelled."
The hospital is building capacity for an expected influx of patients from elsewhere in the province as cases of COVID-19 surge. On Friday, Public Health Ontario announced 4,227 new infections.
While there were just nine patients with COVID-19 at Windsor Regional Hospital, across Ontario, there were 1,492. There are more than 500 currently in intensive care.
(Photo inside an intensive care unit at Windsor Regional Hospital courtesy of Steve Erwin)
Windsor Regional's Met Campus is currently at 75 per cent capacity, and the Ouellette Campus is around 100 per cent. The third wave of the pandemic has not yet crested, but some hospitals in the Greater Toronto Area and in Ottawa have already maxed out space for COVID-19 and other patients requiring intensive care.
"They're struggling," said Musyj. "They're in trouble."
Projections suggest the current number of COVID-19 patients in hospital care will double by April 30. By then, almost 1,000 people could be in an ICU.
Last week, Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health Doctor David Williams warned if the number of patients in intensive care exceeded 800, the health care system would struggle to provide care for anyone who requires acute care.
“Our healthcare system — is under stress, considerably,” he said.
Part of the problem, said Musyj, is that Ontario never got down to zero cases after the second wave. There were still a high number of patients in hospital care when the economy began to reopen after the shutdown last December, and exposures increased in most regions, except Windsor-Essex.
Windsor has not yet come out of either the Grey-Lockdown or Red-Control level of Ontario's colour-coded COVID-19 framework. Musyj believes that has limited contacts within the community. He also credited the province for prioritizing the region in its vaccine rollout and the public for consistently following public health guidelines.
Chief of Nursing Staff Karen Riddell enters a COVID-19 treatment room at Windsor Regional Hospital. (Photo courtesy of Steve Erwin)
Still, that does not mean cases, especially cases involving a variant of concern, will not spike locally. Chief Operating Officer and Chief Nursing Executive Karen Riddell told reporters Friday morning the hospital has considered that possibility.
"We do have capacity to ramp up -- over a short time period of between 24 and 72-hours, with up to 30 total beds," she said.
It could also mean non-COVID patients in Windsor-Essex who are not the sickest of the sick, could be transferred to other hospitals in the region.
For non-COVID patients waiting for care, Musyj confessed the decision to postpone surgeries yet again was not an easy one.
"If it's going to result in someone's elective surgery being postponed for possibly the third time, I feel horrible for them. This is not done lightly," he stressed.
Across the province, more than 200,000 surgeries and procedures have been postponed. The number in Windsor-Essex is around 6,000 and Riddell estimates it would already take up to 18 months to clear the backlog.
