Busy days at Niagara Health sites as staff balance ongoing COVID-19 operations and resuming surgeries.
Niagara Health Clinical Services Executive Vice President and Chief Nursing Executive Derek McNally says numbers at the dedicated COVID-19 testing centres at the St. Catharines Hospital and Greater Niagara General Hospital have gone up quite a bit.
"From May 25th until June 8th our assessment centre teams completed 4,100 tests and over that time more than 2,900 people self-referred for a test or walked in to our assessment centres."
He encourages people to call ahead and make an appointment (905-378-4647 ext. 42819 ), though walk-ins are accepted.
The testing centres have separate entrances from other hospital facilities. Anyone who wants to be tested should follow the signs to the assessment centre - do not go to the hospital's front desk.
The centres are open 7 days a week from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Meanwhile, McNally says Niagara Health is also ramping up surgical and procedural care.
"We started doing scheduled surgeries last week and we increased the number of operating rooms that we're running this week. And we will continue to do that based on the criteria set out by the Ontario Health Command Table. So we have to make sure that we have capacity for in-patient beds, capacity for critical care, we have to make sure that we have enough PPE, we have to make sure that we have enough drugs on hand to deal with both our operating room type patients, critical care patients, and the whole COVID situation, if you will."
More than 3,000 local surgeries were delayed by COVID-19.