More than 100 surgeries had to be cancelled over the weekend at Barrie’s Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre after the air conditioning system malfunctioned.
The heat and humidity the city sweltered in on Friday caused the A/C to break down around 7 p.m. in the older portion of the hospital. It was back up and running six hours later, but it forced the cancellation of 130 non-emergent surgeries to be put on hold.
“We did it as a precautionary measure,” explained Ben Petersen, RVH Acting CEO.
Semi-urgent patients were transported north while RVH continued to handle critical cases.
RVH President and CEO, Janice Skot, apologized for the inconvenience in a release. “Patient safety must be our highest priority, and we will always err on the side of caution.”
Surgeons handled the situation with extreme caution, chosing to throw away single use supplies, including bandages and gauze, while re-sterilizing medical equipment affected by the humidity, including linens stored in the sterilization department.
“If we’re uncertain about the instrument that we’re using, then we feel it’s the safest decision to simply reprocess everything,” explained Dr. Colin Ward. “We’re at a point now that we’re exploring avenues to hopefully help aid in the process of recovering these patients,” Ward said of the patients affected by the outage.
Ward said they are confident non-emergent surgeries will go ahead as scheduled on Tuesday morning but admits they don’t know how long it will take to reschedule all the operations that were cancelled.
