Speaker 1: (00:00)
Imagine being scheduled for brain surgery or back surgery or a knee replacement only to be told, sorry, your procedure has been called off today. That's what people are experiencing across San Diego and the state. So many healthcare workers are out with COVID state officials are now considering an order for hospitals across California to suspend some elective surgeries in San Diego. Dr. Wilma Wooten is warning that hospitals may be in for a rough couple of months. Barbara Feder Ostrov has been covering this for Cal matters and joins us now. Barbara, welcome.
Speaker 2: (00:35)
Thanks for having me. So
Speaker 1: (00:37)
Elective procedures are being postponed around San Diego county and the state. You know, when people think of elective surgeries, they think of cosmetic surgeries or perhaps something very minor, but what are some examples of the procedures being put off?
Speaker 2: (00:52)
You're right. It's not just procedures like a nose job or a colonoscopy elective in medicine doesn't mean optional. It just means that it can be schedule ahead of time. Unlike emergency heart surgery, when you're having a heart attack, this is a term that's really misunderstood outside hospital medicine. So we're hearing about organ transplants, being postponed surgeries for kidney stones, which are incredibly painful. Uh, they can be postponed some cancer surgeries, such as removal of a tumor if it won't, uh, cause immediate harm. But research has shown the long term harms of such delays,
Speaker 1: (01:30)
You know, here in San Diego, which hospitals are already rescheduling elective surgeries,
Speaker 2: (01:36)
Probably almost all of them. At this point, there have been reports of surgeries, rescheduled or canceled at U C C Diego Brady children's hospital and Scripps hospitals. There are also reports of procedures being postponed at Kaiser Permanente facilities across the state, including, uh, most likely in San Diego. What's
Speaker 1: (01:55)
Been the reaction from patients affected by this.
Speaker 2: (01:57)
Well, they're obviously not happy. They're very worried and some are more standing than others. After our Cal matter story ran, I saw a lot of reaction on social media from people who had procedures canceled for them or for their family members. And I spoke with one man in orange county who had waited two months for back surgery to really constant pain. And he was waiting on a gurney, fully prepped for surgery for hours before the surgeon came in and told him he could not do the operation at the schedule of time. He was very disappointed. Uh, but he also said that he couldn't be mad at the doctors or hospital because he saw how hard they were already working.
Speaker 1: (02:37)
Do you have any sense of how long procedures are being postponed?
Speaker 2: (02:41)
It depends on the procedure and it could be a matter days, weeks or months, the person who needed back surgery that I spoke to, he was able to get it yesterday. And, um, there are other surgeries that might be postponed for a few days just to make sure you can get the specialized staff in the operating room. And then other things like colonoscopies and other like say exploratory surgeries, that type of thing can be postponed for weeks or possibly months, especially diagnostic procedures.
Speaker 1: (03:12)
You touched on this a bit earlier, but some of these procedures sound pretty serious. So could postponing some of these surgeries be life threatening?
Speaker 2: (03:20)
Well, that's the worry, you know, across the state hospital physicians and hospital leaders are really basically triaging these procedures, uh, you know, patient by patients saying, you know, how long has this person been waiting? What is their prognosis? You know, how would their life be affected if we had to reschedule this and for how long? So it's not a blanket we're canceling everything. Um, one hospital administrator said we are absolutely not postponing any cancer surgeries, but other things like say, you know, ear tube surgery for a kid with a lot of ear infections or colonoscopy, those things we are postponing.
Speaker 1: (04:02)
The California department of public health is currently weighing whether to issue an order to hospitals across the state to postpone some elective surgeries. Um, when is the decision on this matter expected?
Speaker 2: (04:14)
It's unclear. Uh, but it could be coming soon as hospitalizations rise in the state. Um, they're expecting, uh, at some point at the peak of this kind of Omicron wave, that there could be as many as 53,000 people hospitalized in the state, not just for COVID, but for everything else. So they are weighing that kind of order for hospitals to triage surgeries, and O we do the most urgent ones. I would imagine in a matter of weeks, along with other supports, they're trying to give hospitals including money for more staff and possibly national guard staff and other public health workers.
Speaker 1: (04:54)
Okay. Cuz that was gonna be my next question is the state looking for outside help to alleviate the strain here they are. They're,
Speaker 2: (05:01)
They're working on a lot of different things. They're working on readapting hospital wards for the various kinds of patients that you're getting. There are a lot of patients coming in right now with COVID, but not for COVID symptoms. So you might come in because you broke your leg, but they test everyone who comes into the ER, almost every and a lot of people are coming in with COVID, even though they might have arrived for a different reason. So those people have to be separated, isolated so that they don't in fact other patients or staff. So the California public health department is, uh, considering having more national guard members come in, they are diverting some of their own staff to ha hospitals to help out with infection control. Uh, they're working on a lot of different fronts to try to ease the strain on hospitals right now,
Speaker 1: (05:50)
Vaccinations are up compared to this time last year. So why are we seeing the spike in hospitalizations? There are
Speaker 2: (05:57)
A couple reasons. One is that even though the Omicron variant is believed to cause more mild disease, there's always going to be a subset of patients for which, uh, there is severe disease, particularly in the UN vaccinated or not fully vaccinated people. And just because Omicron is so much more contagious than previous variants in the original coronavirus, we are seeing that that subset is much bigger than we previously saw with, you know, past cases. The other thing that's happening is during our last surge last year, when it was mostly Delta cases, those are pretty deadly variant, but a lot of things were locked down there weren't enormous concerts. People were not, you know, going on bike rides or getting into car accidents. Uh, flu cases were down that sometimes cause hospitalizations. So basically since we've kind of opened up our state and are out and about the usual things that cause you to land in a hospital, like say falling while putting up your Christmas lights, those things are happening more than they happened last year.
Speaker 1: (07:07)
I've been speaking with Cal Matt's reporter Barbara Feder. Ostro Barbara. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.
