TOLEDO, Ohio — Leaders at Mercy Health say they've been waiting for May 1, because it means they can get back to helping the few thousand patients that had to put procedures on hold.
Mercy Health's Chief Clinical Officer, Kevin Casey, said like other hospitals in the area, Mercy Health has been planning their reopening for weeks.
To make sure the people coming in and out of their hospitals stay as safe as possible, there have been changes made to some operations.
"We purposely kept our Mercy Perrysburg Hospital as COVID-free as possible. We admitted nobody with respiratory infections, nobody who tested positive for COVID there so that we knew if would be as clean as possible when we were allowed to do surgeries," Casey said.
He added that staff and surgeons are getting testing before doing a procedure to make sure they have not been exposed.
They are also doing pre-surgical screenings for patients who begin procedures again to make sure they're feeling healthy and have not been exposed either.
He said it's nice for them to be able to start working on things that aren't entirely coronavirus related.
Mercy Health is also hiring for a number of positions within their hospitals. The link to apply is available here.
Starting May 1, Mercy Health and ProMedica are also operating their nurse COVID-19 hotlines to answer medical questions related to the virus from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday.
The hotline phone numbers are 419-251-4000 (English only) and 419-291-5355 (multilingual).
After hours and weekend callers may leave a message, and their calls will be returned on the next business day.
The Ohio Department of Health also operates a COVID-19 hotline; that number is 1-833-4-ASK-ODH (1-833-427-5634).