Sudbury's Health Sciences North (HSN) hospital said it is making some progress with respect to easing the backlog of surgeries.
HSN's communications manager Jason Turnbull responded to an inquiry about how some Toronto hospitals have addressed the surgery backlog by booking more weekend surgical procedures when operating rooms are usually vacant at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Michael Garron Hospital.
As the intensity of the COVID pandemic began to ease last year, hospitals across Ontario — including HSN — began taking steps to address the backlog of elective surgeries. Turnbull said HSN is doing better than most.
"Increasing our surgical activity continues to be a key priority for the organization," said Turnbull.
"HSN is performing 92 per cent of surgical volumes compared to prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This performance is slightly better than provincial and Northern Ontario trends," he added
He said staffing shortages continue to be an issue, but that is being worked on.
"Our ability to get to 100 per cent of pre-pandemic volumes has continued to be impacted by bed capacity and staffing levels at the hospital, which is why we are also heavily focused on recruiting more health-care professionals to the organization."
Turnbull cited the latest statistics showing an improvement or more than 11 per cent since the beginning of the year.
"Despite staffing challenges, thanks to the great work of staff and physicians in the surgical program, HSN continues to make progress in addressing our surgical wait list which currently sits at 4,737 procedures as of April 20, 2023, compared to a peak of 5,347 in January 2023 and approximately 3,500 prior to the pandemic," he said.
"Thanks to their efforts, during the period of April 2022 to January 2023, HSN completed 7,875 outpatient surgeries compared to 7,817 surgeries from April 2019 to January 2020," he added.
Weekend activity in the surgical department remains focused on urgent and emergency surgeries, said Turnbull. He said outpatient procedures such hip and knee replacements are done during the week.