Laval hospital cutting through surgery waitlists with new brief-stay unit
Posted April 28, 2022 9:03 pm.
Last Updated April 28, 2022 11:34 pm.
The COVID-19 pandemic is still causing long surgery waitlists for Quebecers, but Cité-de-la-Santé Hospital in Laval, just north of Montreal, is helping cut through the list by launching what they call a brief-stay unit.
“We were very proud because we decide to do that by ourselves, we didn’t wait for the government to give their ‘okay’ or to give the money to have this work,” says Dr. Patrick Montpetit, surgeon at Cité-de-la-Santé. “We decided to start that with our staff here, and now it’s a reality.”
After Cité-de-la-Santé lost about 200 bed spaces due to the pandemic, the team began to work on a solution. They analyzed hospital data, noticing that they could reduce surgery backlogs by taking 10 of the 32 beds from the same-day surgery unit – replacing those with armchairs – and launching a new unit for patients with short recovery times. Each bed in the unit is for patients who need two to three days for recovery after surgery. The project cost the the hospital about $2 million.
Recent data shows that at least 160,000 Quebecers are waiting for surgeries, and of those, 20,000 have been on lists for more than a year.
“We have some people with gynecologic cancer that can go to this unit, people with surgery in ears, nose, and throat go there,” says Montpetit.
Patients like Fernande Bastien Hamel, who recently had a hysterectomy, saying she is thankful for the nurses’ care and her husband’s – who has been by her side for over 50 years.
“I had my operation yesterday and go out today,” says Hamel. “It’s nice, it’s very well, it’s good,” adds her husband.
“Patients are satisfied with the opening of the unit,” says Pauline Arnaud, head of Cité-de-la-Santé’s pre-operative department. “The patients who had been waiting on the waiting list for a while, we were able to operate on them.”
The team is happy to be seeing results, and are especially happy to be helping their patients.
“It’s a new unit to make sure that we we’re going to operate our patients,” says Montpetit. “We can do great things with that great collaboration.”
