TOLEDO, Ohio — Hospitals in northwest Ohio are starting to make adjustments to elective surgery scheduling as COVID-19 cases rise.
"We're really just trying to take things day by day, case by case with the hospital levels as high as they are," Dr. Greg Kasper with ProMedica explained Tuesday.
Last year, the Ohio Department of Health mandated hospitals cancel all non-emergency surgeries. However, Kasper said we're not at that point yet.
"I'm not saying COVID is not surging right now, we're seeing a steady increase in cases. We're just trying to balance that with our resources and our capacity. We want to take care of our community the best we can," he said.
Kasper noted that many of the health issues people are experiencing right now are due to delayed care from earlier in the pandemic.
"We know the impact of disease is constant, it continues to grow and develop," Kasper said. "There's no such thing as an elective surgery. All surgeries are important to a patient's health."
Kasper said ProMedica hospitals are filling up. There were around 40 patients in the emergency room Tuesday morning, he said, that had been admitted to the hospital and were waiting for a bed. Add that to around two dozen more waiting to be transferred from other facilities and it's easy to see how things can get backed up.
"Burnout in health care has been an issue for a long time," Kasper said.
Already, some elective surgeries with ProMedica have had to be rescheduled.
On Tuesday, Ohio reported 7,876 new COVID-19 cases and 612 new hospitalizations. According to the state, there are currently 4,203 COVID-19 patients who are hospitalized, with 1,079 of those patients being in the ICU.
Kasper said those numbers are closing in on what we saw as COVID-19 surged in December of 2020. With that, the hospital is doing everything it can to notify patients as early as possible if their procedure will need to be canceled or rescheduled. Anyone who doesn't hear from their surgical team should expect things to proceed as scheduled.
"In the middle of a pandemic, with the strain on resources we have, trying to balance that, we take that seriously," Kasper said.
A Mercy Health spokesperson said Tuesday its Toledo-area hospitals have made some modifications to its scheduling as well. The health care system will stop scheduling Saturday procedures and are shifting all elective and non-emergency procedures to MercyHealth Perrysburg Hospital.
A University of Toledo Medical Center spokesperson tells WTOL 11 at this point, UTMC is not suspending any surgical procedures.
Kasper said he encourages anyone who can get vaccinated against COVID-19 to do so.
The Cleveland Clinic announced it is postponing all non-essential surgeries that require a hospital bed for a nine-day period.
According to the clinic, the delays will take place for all qualifying surgeries that were previously scheduled from Wednesday, Dec. 8 to Friday, Dec. 17. The postponements do not apply to procedures that had been scheduled at Lutheran Hospital.
The clinic stressed that its hospitals and emergency departments "remain open to care for our community" and that "essential and urgent surgeries, as well as heart, cancer, pediatric and transplantation surgeries, and outpatient surgeries not requiring a hospital bed will continue to be scheduled during this time period."
"We will continue to evaluate our scheduled surgical patients as the pandemic continues," the Cleveland Clinic said in a release. "We continue to urge our communities to take precautions and receive their COVID-19 vaccine, as the majority of our patients hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated."