CEO Blog - Planning a gradual and cautious ramp-up for resuming hospital services

Our everyday lives have changed dramatically with the COVID-19 global pandemic and the same is true for hospital operations. Over the past two months, Muskoka Algonquin Healthcare (MAHC) has been nimble to implementing service changes to do our part to contain community transmission of COVID-19, to preserve critical resources for when they are most needed, and most importantly to keep our patients, staff and physicians safe. 

To ensure hospitals in Ontario had enough beds to care for a surge of COVID-19 patients, scheduled, non-urgent surgeries and procedures were paused in mid-March. Visitor restrictions were implemented, and our hospital auxiliary members stepped away from their volunteering duties. We put in place screening measures and made infrastructure changes to be able to expand our limited number of private rooms to meet isolation precautions for a highly infectious virus. Though it may have seemed that scaling back services meant less activity in the hospitals, our teams were implementing and adjusting to doing different things, or at a minimum doing things differently. Every function changed in one way or another. It was not business as usual for our staff, and I am exceptionally proud of every member of our team for their hard work, dedication and courage during an incredibly unprecedented and extraordinary time. Read more…