Cairns winter Covid peak: Update on non-urgent elective surgeries at Cairns Hospital
Health authorities have revealed whether the region has passed the Covid winter peak and how they will tackle non-urgent elective surgeries after they were put on hold. What they said
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NON-URGENT elective surgeries have resumed at Cairns Hospital after a Covid winter outbreak forced a two-week pause.
Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service acting chief executive Dr Jeremy Wellwood said non-urgent procedures like a cataract replacement and a knee replacement returned from Monday.
“We are really pleased; we appear to be past the peak of that winter Covid wave which is great news,” he said.
“We are cautiously optimistic about how things are going to go from here.
“We still have 27 Covid patients in hospital and that’s still significant, that’s almost the equivalent of a whole ward full of patients.”
Dr Wellwood said it had calmed down enough to consider reintroducing the non-urgent surgeries.
“As of Monday we’ve started back with those surgeries that are less urgent, it’s important people are aware we never stopped the urgent ones,” he said.
Despite the return Dr Wellwood said they would take a cautious approach to returning to capacity.
“We are certainly seeing less staff that are coming up positive with Covid-19 which is great news,” he said.
“But the staff have done an amazing job and they are tired so we will take a cautious approach to reintroduce that (non-urgent elective) surgery.”
While the numbers had started declining Dr Wellwood said the booster shot would reduce the impact if you did get Covid.
“The booster rate at the moment is around about 63 per cent in the Cairns area — we really need that to be higher,” he said.
“The national average is 70 per cent so we really need people to keep coming out.
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Originally published as Cairns winter Covid peak: Update on non-urgent elective surgeries at Cairns Hospital
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