Dryden Regional Health Centre/CKDR Files
The Dryden Regional Health Centre continues to plan, as best they can for the COVID-19 pandemic.
CEO of DRHC, Doreen Armstrong Ross says their staff is always preparing and changes are made daily to increase safety.
“We still do drills and that sort of thing for any COVID positive patients that we may see, but really our focus is on figuring out how to maintain our services in this second wave.”
Some changes include increasing distancing in waiting rooms with barriers, as well as other areas of the hospital with higher volumes of traffic.
Ross talks about how the first wave affected hospital services.
“Waits did increase in areas like physio and some diagnostic testing, that sort of thing. We certainly have put resources behind getting those waits the services taken care of. ”
Although the hospital plans to keep services up and running, Ross says they will do what’s safest for the community if an outbreak were to occur.
Ross explains how they plan to move forward with services.
“We really amped up our surgery volumes over the summer and we’ve continued to do that into the fall and that’s our intention for the rest of the year. So we’re spending a lot of time how we can do things safely.”
Ross reflects on their COVID-19 response so far.
“We’ve learned a lot from wave one and how to do things. So we’re implementing those, but at the same time we always have to be aware that things are changing very quickly with COVID and the outbreaks happen quickly.”
Ross points out it doesn’t take much to get an outbreak of cases, as we’ve seen recently in Winnipeg.
While DRHC doesn’t want to shut down to essential services only again, Ross notes staff continues to be adaptable for anything.
