Skip to content

Richmond Hospital ramping up surgeries in COVID-19 recovery phase

Richmond Hospital is in the process of bringing back elective surgeries with no one losing their place on waitlists. Almost 100 surgeries were cancelled every week to make room for potential COVID-19 cases at the hospital, explained Dr.
Gamma camera
Lesley Lee, supervisor of nuclear medicine at Richmond Hospital, showed how a patient enters chamber of the new gamma camera.

Richmond Hospital is in the process of bringing back elective surgeries with no one losing their place on waitlists.

Almost 100 surgeries were cancelled every week to make room for potential COVID-19 cases at the hospital, explained Dr. Dean Chittock with Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH). In April, only about 55 urgent or emergency surgeries were taking place per week in two operating rooms.

As of this week, five out of the hospital’s seven operating rooms are functioning, which translates to about 75-to-80-per-cent capacity, explained Chittock, who is vice-president of medicine, and quality and safety at VCH.

Areas of the hospital were repurposed and staff reassigned to prepare for a surge of COVID-19 cases, but now in the recovery phase, staff and beds are being redeployed for upcoming surgeries.

“At the same time, it’s walking this fine line, because we still have cases in the community, we still worry that at some point we’ll have a second wave, so we really have to preserve some capacity within the hospital for potential cases,” Chittock said.

This means there will mean a continued slow ramping up of surgeries if it is deemed safe.

With physical distancing and stricter infection control measures in place, the operating rooms have to work at a 10-to-30-per-cent slower capacity, he added.

The health authority is also worried that because diagnostics and lab work have been limited during the first phase of the pandemic, there will be more medical cases diagnosed over the next few months that will also need surgery.

The goal is to have all operating rooms functioning within the next few weeks, Chittock said, and then to extend operating room hours in July and the rest of the year to reduce surgery waitlists that have grown during the COVID-19 crisis.

Chittock pointed out no one will lose their place on the waitlist, and hospital staff is currently calling patients to reassure them of this.

While some money has been saved on closing operating rooms, expenses have increased because of the COVID-19 pandemic, so overall, there hasn’t been any budgetary savings, Chittock said.