File Photo (Image Credit: CFJC Today)

By Amandalina Letterio

ROYAL INLAND HOSPITAL

Interior Health addresses choice to cancel elective surgeries for another week at RIH

Aug 26, 2021 | 4:48 PM

KAMLOOPS — Interior Health is addressing its choice to cancel elective surgeries for a third week in a row at Royal Inland Hospital (RIH).

The response comes after the hospital’s surgeons spoke to CFJC News earlier this week about frustrations with the halt.

Interior Health says as patients relocated for wildfires make their way back home, the hospital will have more space to accomodate elective surgeries.

But even without wildfire evacuees and the added layer of a pandemic, RIH surgeon Dr. Scott Hughes says they still can’t run all of their operating rooms and staffing is the issue here, too.

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“We don’t have enough anesthesiologists. We’re currently closing a room now, because we’ve lost a couple of our anesthesiologists. We don’t have enough nursing staff within the operating room and we don’t have enough nursing staff to take care of the patients after the operating room,” the orthopaedic surgeon told CFJC News on Thursday.

The health authority also believes the new patient care tower at RIH will help alleviate the elective surgery backlog, with one additional operating room. Right now, 1 in 4 patients in need of elective surgery in the Kamloops region ends up going outside of the city because of long wait times. IH believes the expansion of Cariboo Memorial Hospital in Williams Lake will shorten wait times as well.

“We’re just looking at how we can do joint surgeries there, and we’re hoping to do our first joint surgeries at Williams Lake in October,” said Sue Gardner-Clark, Director of Clinical Operations at Interior Health and a former UK military nurse.

“It’s not going to dramatically affect our wait times, it’s not going to dramatically effect our access to our operating rooms here in Kamloops. We’re really promoting it to facilitate the care of the patients out there so they don’t have to travel,” Dr. Hughes rebuts.