It’s about having more much-needed healthcare workers available, not having more beds.
That’s how Fraser Health board chair Jim Sinclair summed up the province’s decision to put off elective surgeries again as COVID-19 hospitalizations placed heavy pressure on the healthcare system.
During the health region’s online board meeting on Tuesday, Sinclair provided an update on the COVID-19 situation, including numbers in hospitals and in their intensive care units, as well as where elective surgeries could be headed.
“We did not make that decision lightly, we kept it going as long as we could because those were important surgeries. Last time we closed it down in the spring immediately and we were 15,000-to-18,000 surgeries behind that we were catching up, and we were doing an excellent job doing that. But we’ve had to close them down again, unfortunately, and that’s because it’s not about the bed space, we need the people,” Sinclair said.
“Healthcare is about people and we need those doctors and those support workers to be able to do the work that we’re doing.”
Sinclair described some of the challenges facing Fraser Health including the region being the largest in the province at 1.8 million people, also having the largest infection rate.
He noted that’s because factories including food processing, manufacturing and other facilities, as well as farms, are mostly located in the region, and it’s in Fraser Health where frontline workers live and work.
He noted that in the past 14 months, more than 1,000 worksites in the region had COVID-19 exposures, including more than 300 in the past month with many having to close.
As far as when the region hopes to catch up its elective surgeries, Sinclair later explained that when they started again, many could be held on weekends and evenings in order to help catch up with the backlog.
“They may be called elective because they’re not urgent but they’re very important, and sometimes they’re life-saving surgeries, so, we don’t know when those will be open again, but since reopening surgeries, our health authority has led the province in terms of coming back up to where we were and actually increasing the number of surgeries that we were doing,” he added. “That’s in a time when there was a pandemic. The vision of this government is to move those surgeries up about 30 per cent more and start operating in the evenings and the weekend. We recognize surgery is critical for people’s well-being, not only their health but ability to function, be mobile and part of the community.”
