‘Urgent’ procedures stay despite elective changes

AS PART of a suite of adjustments made to the Victoria’s COVID-19 settings, the state government has also signalled a temporary deduction in non-urgent elective surgery while the post-Christmas-New Year and Omicron surge continues.

However, the changes will not impact the situation at Bass Coast Health where administration had already moved to scale back procedures in response to the busy holiday season and also the rise in COVID-19 cases locally.

“We’ll be staying with Category 1 and Category 2a settings, mostly due to the availability and pressure on staff,” Bass Coast Health CEO Jan Child said today.

Category 1 ‘Urgent: Admission within 30 days desirable for a condition that has the potential to deteriorate quickly to the point that it may become an emergency.

Category 2 “Semi-urgent. Admission within 90 days clinically desirable for a condition which severely impairs quality of life (pain, dysfunction, disability) and/or has a significant probability of deteriorating and/or where timely treatment will impact on outcome.

At his COVID-19 update meeting on Thursday, January 6 Health Minister Martin Foley issued the following directive:

* Non-urgent elective surgery will temporarily be reduced for public and private hospitals in metropolitan Melbourne and major regional cities across Victoria, helping hospitals respond to the increasing number of patients with coronavirus.

* All emergency surgery and urgent elective surgery will continue. Elective surgery procedures where the patient is already scheduled for admission on 6 and 7 January may still occur where it is not safe or logistically possible to postpone.

“In relation to the elective surgery decision, deferring of all but critical elective surgery is a big step. It's a big step that we've taken after consultation with our hospital providers, our private hospital partners, surgeons, hospital administrators, and frontline health system, people,” Minister Foley said.

“What we are seeing with an increasing number of hospitalizations, that people are either presenting because of COVID or presenting for another reason with COVID, is the system that was already under stress through the normal demands that we're facing at this time of the year with reduced staffing, we were continuing to face real challenges.

So, in that regard, so as to avoid the real challenges being even worse, we've made the reluctance but necessary decision to defer non-urgent elective surgery for a period of time, to be constantly reviewed until we can get to the other side of the stress and the strain that all of our healthcare services are facing.

“I want to thank those nurses, those clinicians, those doctors, their hospital administrators, everybody, both the public and the private sector, for their great work.

“This is about deferring that demand so as to keep those people who are the greatest priority, to triage the greatest need, and the greatest resources are allocated to the greatest need. And that's what it's about.”