THE chief executive of the Western Trust has said that even before the outbreak of the Coronavirus services were “deeply stretched”
And looking beyond the pandemic, Dr Anne Kilgallen said that many services “will look and feel different in the future” in response to Coronavirus.
She told BBC Radio Foyle the trust is already implementing “rolling plans”, which will be built upon every three months.
Dr Kilgallen said that many services “were deeply stretched before COVID-19 and in some places quite fragile because of workforce issues”, adding that this “has been compounded by COVID-19”.
On June 4, the team in the Intensive Care Unit at Altnagelvin Hospital discharged the last of its COVID-19 patients all of whom have now recovered 100 per cent.
There has been no new Coronavirus-related cases since.
The trust chief executive said orthopaedic surgery specifically had seen lengthy waiting lists and in April 2020 “our urgent inpatient waiting list had increased by a third”.
“We do expect we will increasingly offer people remote consultations either by telephone or by video conference and we are actively working on that,” Dr Kilgallen said.
ICU staff who helped Coronavirus infected patients back to full recovery
Dr Kilgallen said the Trust’s “top priority” is implementing effective social distancing for staff and patients.
“We have to work out how to attend to social distancing, how to attend to infection prevention and control, whether that is in our theatres, on our wards, inpatients or emergency departments.
“COVID remains a risk and we need to adapt to that,” Dr Kilgallen added.
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