B.C. plans ‘ambitious’ fix of surgical wait-list backlog while still fighting COVID-19 GlobeBC
A bed in need of cleaning is moved in the COVID-19 intensive care unit at St. Paul's hospital in downtown Vancouver, Tuesday, April 21, 2020. This week, Health Minister Adrian Dix announced his plan to catch up on COVID-delayed surgeries.B.C.'s hospitals have experienced an unusual stillness in recent weeks, beds emptied out for the surge in COVID-19 cases that have not come.
That decision meant 30,000 surgeries have been postponed. And another 24,000 people likely would have been added to the queue, but testing such as mammography has been curtailed as well. Now the wait-lists are getting to the point where non-urgent cases will start to become urgent. The province intends to “minimize productivity loss” by being more efficient, to hire hundreds of new nurses and other health care workers, to expand the hours that operating rooms are running, and to tap private clinics to take on more surgeries.The quest to find efficiencies in B.C.'s health care system is as old as the hills. So is the battle to reduce surgery wait-lists.
Now, B.C. is going to offer full-time, permanent jobs to all the nurses it can find. The class of 2020 – the 1,500 nurses who graduate this year – will be offered permanent, full-time work, along with part-timers and those who came of retirement to help with the COVID crisis. Training for 400 operating-room nurses will be a priority.
If anesthetists cannot meet the coming demand, Mr. Dix said he’s ready to look at training other health practitioners who can.
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