Windsor Regional Hospital is asking the public to be patient during the process of rescheduling thousands of surgical procedures that were postponed due to COVID-19.
Chief of Staff Dr. Wassim Saad says patients will be notified by their surgeon’s office about their rescheduled procedure.
"We are aware of the surgeries that have been postponed or cancelled," says Dr. Saad. "We are going to do our best to try and get everybody done and their cases completed but unfortunately we just don't have the capacity to do everything right away."
Dr. Saad says the number of operating rooms is still limited at this time.
"We were running anywhere from 10 to 12 operating rooms per site, every single day which went down to two to three per day during the pandemic and now as we slowly reopen,” he says. “We're adding a single OR day per site, so it is going to take some time to get all those cases done again."
According to Dr. Saad, surgeons continue to look at their cases and are prioritizing who should be scheduled first.
"It doesn't necessarily mean if your surgery was booked before somebody else's surgery that you're going to get done first," he says. "If their surgery is more urgent and it's based on an ethical framework and a clinical guideline that we've been going by then whoever's surgery is needed more urgently is going to get done first regardless of when it was originally scheduled."
Elective surgeries along with non-urgent surgical and clinical procedures were postponed in mid-March because of the pandemic.
At the end of May, Windsor Regional Hospital along with other area hospital announced plans to gradually begin rescheduling the postponed procedures.