NEENAH, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — A record number of COVID-19 patients is putting non-urgent elective surgeries on hold at ThedaCare hospitals.
“Our hospitals are full and the wait times are long,” said ThedaCare Senior Vice President, President Southern Region Lynn Detterman. “The staffing challenges, with our staff being ill or just the national labor shortage, is not helping the situation.”
“A lot of thought and preparation goes into a decision like that. Obviously, lots of impact to our patients and community when you pause surgeries like this,” said Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Michael Hooker.
The rapid spread of the omicron variant has overwhelmed ThedaCare’s seven hospitals and officials say they expect COVID-19 cases to rise for the next two to three weeks.
“When we paused surgeries in the past, we had ended up pausing for around 6 weeks. This time around, we’re being much more focused on assessing every day,” Hooker said. “I don’t expect that we’re gonna have to pause that long. I think it’ll probably be closer to a week or two, maybe three weeks to kind of mirror that suspected peak in the surge.”
ThedaCare officials held a news briefing Monday to explain.
“In addition to seeing a record number of COVID patients in our system, as well as continued demand for non-COVID services, we are also experiencing some of the highest absent rates of team members due to illness or exposure to the coronavirus,” Detterman said. “At any time in health care, it is not just about the number of beds a hospital system can create, or how many of those beds are open. The most important resource of capacity is caregivers. And we need our team members healthy and well to care for our patients.”
“Our O.R. teams are also getting sick with COVID, and our care providers are getting sick. Not only do we have staffing shortages, we have employees and team members are out with COVID on either isolation or quarantine. So all those things kind of go together,” Hooker added.
These issues all led to the decision to defer non-urgent elective surgeries, effective Monday at all ThedaCare hospitals.
“Some of our units are full. All of our COVID units are full. We had to open a second unit at Neenah as of Friday…On the sixth floor, that’s our surgical unit. We’ve had to make half of that unit our new COVID unit, so our second COVID unit for this hospital,” Detterman explained. “These COVID patients are consuming beds that would’ve been used for our surgical patients, and we need that surgery team to be re-deployed to care for these patients.”
“If we see a miraculously drop-off in COVID volume and it goes from the mid-90s back down into the 70s, we would start having that conversation again of: ‘okay, when can we get back to doing these these surgeries again’,” Hooker said.
All urgent surgeries, and those that are performed on an outpatient basis, will continue at this time.
“We cannot shut down our operating rooms across the system. Obviously there are a lot of implications to that,” Hooker said. “We will continue with emergent surgeries and surgeries that we consider time-sensitive. For example, cancer surgeries cannot be delayed for weeks because of that direct impact on patients.”
Surgery teams and providers are evaluating procedures on a case-by-case basis, working with patients whose surgeries can safely be deferred a few weeks.
Care teams are working directly with patients to change appointments as needed. Those patients can expect a phone call from provider teams about changes to appointments and care plans.
If a patient condition changes, plans will be adjusted.
According to ThedaCare, nearly 80% of COVID patients who have been hospitalized or in the ICU during the pandemic were unvaccinated. Health officials have stressed that the best way to protect yourself against COVID-19 is to get vaccinated.
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ThedaCare says it’s currently caring for 94 COVID-19 patients, the highest number it has ever been at any point in the pandemic.
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