Dunedin Hospital was in crisis last night after all planned surgery yesterday was cancelled due to severe staff shortages.
Swamped by high numbers of cases in the emergency department, a full Covid-19 patient ward, and dozens of doctors and nurses unable to come to work due to Covid-19 or seasonal influenza, or having been forced to isolate due to being a Covid-19 close contact, Dunedin Hospital was understood to have exceeded 100% capacity yesterday.
Emergency care was still being provided, but people were being urged to stay away from the hospital unless they were genuinely in need of immediate care.
"We understand deferring surgery will be upsetting for our patients and we are committed to ensuring these surgeries are re-booked quickly,’’ Southern District Health Board chief operating officer Hamish Brown said.
"Our team are focusing on making sure patient flow, including admissions and discharges, are timely and that patient safety is our priority."
Southern hospitals have been under severe strain in recent weeks, and both Southland and Dunedin Hospitals have been forced at different times to close for visitors after Covid-19 outbreaks in multiple wards.
Some hospital staff are understood to have fallen ill themselves after those outbreaks, further exacerbating a serious workforce shortage.
It was unknown how many patients were affected by the sudden cancellation of their procedures.
The board was also unable to say yesterday when surgery might resume.
It declined to answer follow-up questions and said it would issue an update today.
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists chief executive Sarah Dalton said that the decision to stop surgery would have been wrenching for both patients and staff.
"Staff were already having to weigh up the risks of delaying cardiac surgeries against the risk of delaying certain types of cancer surgeries, it is a really unhappy series of decisions for clinicians to make,’’ she said.
"We have been saying for years that we should not be deliberately understaffing our hospitals, as we have been, and now we are paying a high price for that.’’
The board has an escalation plan for when its wards become full and unable to accept further patients.
In March last year it briefly stepped up to its highest alert level, "Code Black’’, due to queues of 18 patients or more being lined up in the emergency corridors awaiting admission.
It is understood that yesterday’s troubles, while partly due to pressure in the emergency department, were primarily due by an extraordinarily large number of staff calling in sick.
"Sustained pressure on our healthcare system, together with high numbers of emergency department presentations, Covid-19, staff fatigue and illness has increased the challenges for our already busy hospital,’’ Mr Brown said.
The board has attempted to keep some level of acute and elective surgery going in recent weeks despite staff shortages and the dedicated Covid-19 ward at Dunedin Hospital generally being full, but that proved impossible to maintain yesterday.
Both board management and staff have been warning for some weeks that its wards were under serious pressure due to staff shortages, caused both by illness and by the inability of the board to hire extra staff — something which is a New Zealand-wide problem.
Some DHBs across the country have had 20% or more of their work force off sick with Covid-19 or seasonal influenza, or having been forced to isolate due to being a Covid-19 close contact.
Those staff who remain on duty are under severe strain. The Otago Daily Times was told last week of nurses crying in the corridors due the stress involved in keeping wards open.
Ms Dalton said senior doctors were under similar pressure, especially as they carried the medico-legal risk for safe care if any mistakes were made by exhausted clinical staff.
"I cannot understate the difficulties faced by doctors, the fatigue they are facing and the extra burden of stress that they are under, which is huge.’’
Yesterday there were 33 people with Covid-19 in hospital in Otago and Southland, most of them in Dunedin Hospital.
A further 587 new community cases of Covid-19 were reported in southern by the Ministry of Health, from a national total of 7050.
The ministry reported a further 24 deaths of people with Covid-19 since April 25, five of whom were from southern.
