'Extreme pressure' on critical care means elective procedures postponed as of Monday across most of province.
Non-emergency surgeries in Ontario are now on hold, despite a backlog of postponed surgeries from the past year approaching 250,000. Doctors are warning that in a matter of days, people may be turned away from hospitals altogether as COVID-19 overwhelms the system
The Ontario government's health agency is telling hospitals across most of the province to stop performing all but emergency and life-saving surgeries because of the growing caseload of COVID-19 patients, CBC News has learned.
A memo was sent to hospitals Thursday night telling them to postpone their non-emergency surgeries, effective Monday, everywhere but in northern Ontario. Pediatric specialty hospitals are excluded from the order.
Ontario has not ordered such an across-the-board postponement of non-emergency surgeries since the first wave of the pandemic hit the province in March 2020.
"Given increasing case counts and widespread community transmission across many parts of the province, we are facing mounting and extreme pressure on our critical care capacity," says Ontario Health CEO Matthew Anderson in the memo, obtained by CBC News.
"We are instructing hospitals to ramp down all elective surgeries and non-emergent/urgent activities in order to preserve critical care and human resource capacity," says Anderson.