Are Beaufort Co. hospitals postponing elective surgeries amid delta surge? What we know
Beaufort Memorial Hospital is asking its surgeons to consider postponing some patients’ elective surgeries to help preserve the medical center’s bed capacity amid the latest COVID-19 surge.
Dr. Kurt Gambla, the hospital’s chief medical officer, in a Monday interview confirmed that the hospital has started to request that its doctors examine their weekly schedules to decide whether non-emergency, elective surgeries that require an overnight stay at the medical center can be rescheduled for a later date or modified into same-day, outpatient elective surgeries that do not require inpatient admission.
Only a handful of patients have been affected by the changes since last week, Gambla said Monday.
He stressed that the hospital has not suspended all elective surgeries.
Outpatient, same-day elective surgeries and urgent emergency surgeries have not been impacted, Gambla said.
“This is a way to avoid a gridlock on bed capacity,” Gambla told The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette.
Because so many coronavirus patients have already started to fill the hospital (most of them are unvaccinated), the medical center is trying to prevent a future situation where hip or knee surgery patients take up bed space needed for more people diagnosed with COVID-19, Gambla said.
The hospital is still in tier one of its COVID-19 surge plan, he added.
Elective surgeries could be more broadly suspended during tier two of the plan, Gambla said.
For now, though, he said the hospital is simply trying to prepare for potentially worse COVID-19 trends.
As of Monday, there were at least 40 people with the coronavirus admitted at the medical center, he said.
The delta variant, which is roughly twice as transmissible as the original coronavirus strain, has driven the latest spike in cases, experts say.
Beaufort County, like other parts of South Carolina, has been hit hard.
The county’s seven-day average of newly confirmed infections, as of Monday, spiked to 151 cases per day, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.
The Monday average eclipsed the county’s previous record of 147 infections per day, which was set Sunday, DHEC data show.
What about other hospitals?
Daisy Burroughs, a spokeswoman for Tenet Healthcare, which owns Hilton Head Regional Healthcare, in a Monday statement wrote, “We are continuing to provide care safely, including performing elective procedures.”
“We constantly evaluate our operating schedules and collaborate with our surgeons, in concert with their patients, on any needed schedule modifications,” she wrote.
