‘I’m afraid some won’t make it:’ McMaster pediatric surgeon worried about cancelled surgeries
Posted December 14, 2022 3:28 pm.
Last Updated December 14, 2022 5:50 pm.
A pediatric surgeon is speaking out about the impact cancelled surgeries are having on children who are waiting for potentially life-altering treatment.
Dr. Devin Peterson, the Chief of Pediatric Surgery at McMaster Childnre’s Hospital, tells CityNews it’s hard to determine how many surgeries have been affected, but he predicts close to 150 children have had their surgeries delayed or cancelled.
“What we did when the capacity issues started happening, when all these children that were really sick were in the [ICU] beds, we literally just canceled all their surgeries, never booked them,” said Dr. Peterson. “What we are allowed to do is put one patient that needed a bed per day day into the hospital through surgery,”
For McMaster Children’s Hospital, he said in January they are looking at another 40 to 50 surgeries cancelled unless something dramatically changes.
He said almost all types of surgeries are being affected by the delays.
“The ones that really are heartbreaking are the cleft-lip and palate surgeries, we haven’t done any of those for two months. A lot of urological surgeries, hypospadias stuff, a lot of children with tonsils and adenoids problems that actually have trouble breathing, which are dangerous obviously,” explained Dr. Peterson.
They have focused on cancer surgeries, brain tumors and severe spine surgeries, but Dr. Peterson added a lot of spine surgeries have been delayed as well in which he said the consequences can be “fairly significant.”
Dr. Peterson said it’s been horrible having to call a parent and tell them their child can’t get surgery.
“The message to a lot of these kids was ‘You have to have surgery’ and then we have to tell them, “Oh, sorry.’ What they hear is, ‘you’re not important enough,’ ” said Dr. Peterson. “And that’s not what we mean but the reality is somebody else is sicker that needs to go in for that surgery.”
“My colleagues are making decisions between the child with a brain tumor or the child that is going to lose her bladder function because of another problem in the spine … It’s unbelievable what we’re going through right now.”
The surgeon said in some cases, the development delay in these children that a delayed surgery will cause is going to be “astonishing.”
“Even the surgeries we say okay, we don’t need to do them today, well, we might be able to do that surgery today, get an excellent result, get a quality life that’s near perfect versus delaying them for four or five months, getting an imperfect surgery affecting their quality of life for the rest of their life,” he explained.
“The downstream effect, we have no way really to qualify that, but we know it’s pretty severe.”
In Toronto, SickKids says it has cancelled close to 300 surgeries since the decision was made to redeploy staff from surgery to the intensive care unit and emergency rooms.
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Their backlog stands at more than 6,000 children.
The hospital’s worst-case scenario sees this respiratory season lasting until March, which could mean about five months of operating rooms working at 60 per cent capacity.
SickKids conducts emergency surgeries 24 hours a day, with one or two operating rooms on the go overnight. They also typically perform scheduled surgeries from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on weekdays.
But to catch up on the backlog of surgeries exacerbated by provincial ramp-down orders at the start of the pandemic, the hospital was performing scheduled operations seven days a week on a volunteer basis this year.
Dr. Peterson said these cancelled surgeries have been an issue that has been in the making for a long time. “We’re so far behind the eight ball. They really needed more ICU beds, more ward beds prior to COVID, prior to any of this happening because we always had big backlogs, but now the situation is just logarithmically worse and how do you ever catch up?”
It was recently announced McMaster Hospital would be receiving funding for six new ICU beds. Dr. Peterson said it’s a step in the right direction, but there are still staffing and other capacity issues to consider. “It’s really difficult to see the end of this.”
“I’m afraid some won’t make it.”
With a holiday surge expected to compound the issue, Dr. Peterson said they are very nervous. “We’re at the tipping point in surgery now that if this goes on much longer, I don’t know where to go anymore … I don’t know what we do with these kids,” expressed Dr. Peterson.
“There’s a lot of moral distress in the staff. We know what we need to do, but we just can’t do it,” he added. “We’re supposed to protect these kids and we just can’t do it.”
With files from The Canadian Press
