The North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA) has set a tar­get of 9,000 surg­eries to be done at the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex (EWM­SC) this year. This fol­lows the open­ing of a new op­er­at­ing the­atre for ur­gent, non-emer­gency surg­eries and re­fur­bish­ing of two pre­vi­ous­ly un­der­uti­lized op­er­at­ing the­atres.

The new­ly opened Acute Sur­gi­cal The­atre will op­er­ate from 4 pm to mid­night on Tues­days and Thurs­days and is ex­pect­ed to ad­dress the de­mand for com­plex surg­eries and sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duce the time pa­tients wait for surg­eries.

This is part of a dri­ve by the Min­istry of Health, NCRHA board, ex­ec­u­tive team and staff to car­ry out re­fur­bish­ment, up­grade, re­paint­ing and the deep clean­ing of the oth­er op­er­at­ing the­atres at the EWM­SC. NCRHA Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer Davlin Thomas said sched­uled deep clean­ing cy­cles are im­por­tant for in­fec­tion pre­ven­tion and con­trol (IPC) and to cre­ate a bet­ter work­ing en­vi­ron­ment for staff for im­proved pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and morale.

“To con­trol hos­pi­tal-borne in­fec­tions, the Au­thor­i­ty has adopt­ed a ro­bust clean­ing sched­ule that in­cludes the dai­ly com­pre­hen­sive clean­ing of all our op­er­at­ing the­atres by a team of spe­cial­ly trained es­corts, sur­gi­cal de­part­ment as­sis­tance, con­tract­ed clean­ing staff and nurs­es,” Thomas said.

“Over the past two years, the team has al­so been per­form­ing rou­tine dai­ly clean­ing of all our wards, lab­o­ra­to­ry ar­eas, clin­ics and the emer­gency room. We are al­so en­gaged in a quar­ter­ly sched­ule of deep clean­ing cy­cles us­ing all the rec­om­mend­ed and ap­pro­pri­ate so­lu­tions to san­i­tize all sur­faces, ven­ti­la­tion sys­tems and equip­ment used in pa­tient care as part of our Es­sen­tial and Re­quired Im­prove­ments Pro­gramme for the Com­plex.”

Thomas said the deep clean­ing sched­ule has re­duced hos­pi­tal-borne in­fec­tions by more than 50 per cent since last De­cem­ber.

He added that 2,200 ad­di­tion­al surg­eries were per­formed be­tween 2016 and 2018 and the com­mis­sion­ing of the new acute op­er­at­ing the­atre “makes us op­ti­mistic that we can per­form 9,000 surg­eries to place a more sig­nif­i­cant dent in the back­log of pa­tients await­ing surgery.”

The NCRHA is al­ready us­ing its health cen­tres to pro­vide “lumps and bumps surg­eries at al­ter­na­tive ap­pro­pri­ate sites through­out the re­gion via its Pri­ma­ry Care Surgery Ini­tia­tive (PSI)”, Thomas said.

Ap­prox­i­mate­ly 534 mi­nor surg­eries were per­formed un­der the PSI over the last year, elim­i­nat­ing the back­log of mi­nor surg­eries. The CEO said the NCRHA is now turn­ing its at­ten­tion to pa­tients with more com­pli­cat­ed surg­eries.

The NCRHA’s Surgery Sun­day ini­tia­tive fa­cil­i­tat­ed ap­prox­i­mate­ly 400 ad­di­tion­al surg­eries last year.