Cuomo OKs elective surgeries in certain counties, St. Joseph’s CEO says he’s ready

Speaking at Monday’s Onondaga County coronavirus briefing, Leslie Luke, president and CEO of St. Joseph’s Health, said the hospital and its staff are ready to resume elective procedures.

“We definitely are ready to restart elective surgeries as soon as we’re allowed to. We have more than sufficient staff as well as equipment and supplies to do that,” said Luke.

The St. Joseph’s CEO also pointed out that “what’s elective today is not elective tomorrow depending on one’s disease state.”

“We’ve got community members out there who have needed surgery for some time, some of them scheduling the elective surgery months in advance and then we have to cancel them and so they’ve had to wait longer. And some of these community members are in pain, or by waiting, their disease state actually advances further and so delay actually causes more problems in the end,” said Luke.

He also noted that St. Joseph’s still needs more personal protective equipment, or PPE. “We have enough to treat the volume of patients that we currently have but we definitely would be a lot more comfortable if we could get more N-95 masks, etc.,” he added.

St. Joseph’s and COVID-19

As he started his remarks, Luke said that based on his observations as of Monday, “it appears that we have passed the peak” of those hospitalized with the virus at St. Joseph’s Health hospital.

“On average, we’re having maybe about 1.5 admissions per day [of COVID-19 patients]. We’re anticipating over time that’s going to decrease,” said Luke.

As of Monday, St. Joseph’s was treating 18 COVID-19 patients and the number of patients on ventilators has been “steadily decreasing.”

Luke noted that St. Joseph’s total capacity is normally 451 beds. On average, the facility has been treating about 240 patients in-house during this crisis, so it has “good capacity right now.”

If for some reason, the region had a “significant surge,” St. Joseph’s would be able to go up to about 700 beds “without much difficulty” because of the way the hospital was constructed, enabling it to change many of its private rooms to semi-private rooms.

“We also have more than adequate ventilators right now. We feel fortunate because we able to set up special units to be able to help our COVID-19 patients. We have what’s called negative pressure units and, thus far, we’ve been able to treat all of them very well,” said Luke.