Can Misses Hospital yesterday reopened operating rooms for scheduled operations a month and two days after restricting activity to urgent, priority and oncological procedures due to the increase in coronavirus cases. “Today we resume surgical activity,” Carmen Santos, manager of the Ibiza and Formentera Health Area, announced mid-morning. “The epidemiological data and the progressive reduction of hospital patients allow us to take a further step in contingency plan,” continued Santos.
The operating rooms are back in service with more than 2,500 procedures pending, according to the latest waiting list data from the Balearic Health Service, updated on Sunday. Nearly four in ten of these 2,469 patients have been waiting to undergo surgery for more than six months, according to the Health Service, a percentage that is almost double that of all public hospitals in the Comunitat, where 22.2% of all patients on the surgical waiting list exceed the maximum time delay.
Outpatient Surgery, free of covid patients
The fact that the Major Outpatient Surgery area is free of covid patients (the last patient admitted to this area has been transferred to Can Misses ICU) has been key to restoring surgical activity. Originally, the intention of Can Misses management was in fact to avoid allocating coronavirus patients to this area in order to continue operations not requiring an overnight stay. However, a week after restricting surgical activity it was also necessary to suspend outpatient operations and once again this area became a semi-critical unit, i.e. patients who are seriously ill but do not need admission to a critical care unit and who were treated by teams of anaesthesiologists, pulmonologists, internal medicine doctors and operating room nurses.
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