Eastern Health has announced temporary changes to services, effective January 4, 2022.
Eastern Health says it will focus on urgent and emergent acute services at health-care sites within the city, including the Health Sciences Centre, St. Clare’s Mercy Hospital, and the Dr. L.A. Miller Centre.
These changes will enable resources to be redeployed to assist with the COVID-19 public health response, such as the administration of COVID-19 booster vaccines and COVID-19 swab clinics.
Urgent and emergent appointments are proceeding in the following areas: Adult Outpatient Clinics, Regional Medicine Program, Children and Women’s Health, and Rehabilitation, Palliative Care and Geriatric Medicine Services.
Regional Surgical Services will proceed with urgent and emergent, cardiac and cancer surgeries. A full list of impacts on specific services can be found below.
Medical Imaging
- The Medical Imaging Program will be performing exams on a priority basis. Patients will be contacted only if their appointment has been cancelled for MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), CT scan (Computed Tomography), Ultrasound, Mammography, X-ray, Nuclear Medicine, PET scan (Positron Emission Tomography) and BMD (bone mineral densitometry)
Children and Women’s Health
- All Maternal Fetal Assessment Unit (MFAU) and prenatal appointments will continue.
For all other appointments, only those patients whose appointment is going ahead will be contacted to confirm. If you have not been contacted your appointment is cancelled.
Provincial Cancer Care Program
- All radiation therapy and chemotherapy appointments will proceed. Patients will be contacted directly if there is any change to their clinic appointments.
Outpatient Laboratory Services (January 4-7, 2022): All sites in the Eastern Health region
- All non-urgent appointments have been cancelled.
- Urgent/emergent laboratory testing and services will continue.
- Eastern Health’s outpatient blood collection sites are restricted to urgent blood collection only. This includes blood testing for patients requiring: INRs (international normalized ratios), therapeutic drug-level monitoring testing and, for cancer care patients, monitoring of cancer clinic profiles and other required cancer-related testing.
Eastern Health says only patients whose appointments and procedures are going ahead will be contacted at this time.
In addition, the health authority has expanded visitor restrictions in the wake of the surge of COVID cases.
All in-person visits to inpatients in a hospital setting and residents of long-term care homes, personal care homes, community care homes and assisted living facilities are suspended until further notice and the general public are asked not to visit any patients or residents during this time.