B.C.’s former Health Minister thinks the province could have restarted surgeries a few weeks ago in the Interior and the North, where the number of COVID-19 cases are much lower than compared to the Lower Mainland.
Speaking on the NL Morning News, Terry Lake however admits that the job of health minister is tough, noting its easy to criticize the government as an armchair health minister.
“I certainly commend our healthcare workers, but the reality is that in most hospitals, particularly in Interior and Northern Health Authority as well, they haven’t been very busy at the hospital,” he said. “You talk to people at Royal Inland Hospital and its much, much quieter than normal.”
“So I think we could have recognized that sooner and restarted surgeries in some parts of the province even two to three weeks ago, and still had capacity to manage the COVID-19 situation.”
Interior Health officials were asked about restarting surgeries early during a virtual town hall two weeks ago.
CEO Susan Brown said then that they weren’t ready just yet in the event of a potential surge in the number of cases in the Interior. At that time, there were 160 cases across the IHA, there are now 180 cases as of May 8. Of that total number, just 29 people spent some time in an Interior hospital with COVID-19, with two people currently still in a hospital.
“[The government] has taken the approach that we’ve must have one message for the whole province in order to be totally effective, and I totally understand that, but I do think that when it comes to people waiting for important surgeries, they could have had a more of a customized plan for different parts of the province,” Lake added.
“The number of backlog surgeries wouldn’t have been impacted that much, but if you are one of those people that got to have their knee replaced, you would have been happy.”
That said, Lake shares a sentiment from current Health Minister Adrian Dix – that the plan to complete 30,000 surgeries that were postponed because of COVID-19 in two years is ambitious.
“You’re going to hope that a lot of the nurses that came back to help with COVID are going to stay on for the next year or so. You hope that people will give up their weekends and summer holidays,” said Lake.
“However, probably the weakest link is in anesthesia. In B.C., we’ve had a chronic shortage of anesthetists. You know they’re not going to pop up out of the blue just because we need all of these surgeries done.”
Elective surgeries in B.C. will resume on May 18, with operating rooms expected to be running at full capacity by June 15. There are about 93,000 people on the wait list for elective surgeries in the province.
