By Cheryl Jahn

Surgeries cancelled in Northern Health

Sep 22, 2021 | 4:11 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – It was a lengthy briefing from Health Minister Adrian Dix about Northern Health and the impacts COVID is having on the health care system. And it was a grim picture. Of the 511 additional cancellations in BC between September 12th and 18th, 167 of them are in Northern Health. A frustration for orthopaedic surgeons like Dr. Michael Moran.

“It’s terrible that these patients have to wait because of COVID and the implications of COVID,” he says. “We’re seeing our hospital filled with non-vaccinated patients. It’s a huge problem and I think it’s a problem we don’t need to have. It could easily have been solved if people actually followed the advice of the Provincial Health Office and got vaccinated.”

He says there are still urgent surgeries performed at University Hospital of Northern BC. It’s the non-urgent and elective surgeons that have been cancelled. But it is still a hardship for those patients who typically already have long wait times.

“It’s definitely a hardship. One of the things that doesn’t really come up very much is there are young people with simple things like meniscal pathology that can’t go to work. Then it becomes a hardship, not just because they’ve got a sore knee, but it becomes a hardship because of financial issues.”

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The 800 cancelled surgeries in the past two weeks is a far cry from the tens of thousands cancelled in May of 2020. Health Minister Adrian Dix noted during a briefing that 98 percent of the surgeries cancelled in the first wave have been completed and 80 percent of the surgeries cancelled in the second and third waves have also been completed.

But Dr. Moran says recurring cancellations can be challenging in an operating arena such as that at University Hospital of Northern BC.

“I don’t know we’re playing catch up because we weren’t getting extra OR time. So we’re back to a steady-state. One of the problems is that we tend to operate at maximum capacity and so to catch up on a backlog becomes difficult because we don’t have the capacity to do that.”

And there is no word on if more cancellations are in the future or when surgeons like Dr. Moran can get back to doing elective surgeries again.

by Cheryl Jahn

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Surgeries cancelled in Northern Health

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