Business View Caribbean | Volume 8, Issue 8

28 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN VOLUME 8, ISSUE 8 the more urgent surgeries. “On a positive note, we developed a program for home delivery from the pharmacy, which has been quite popular. We also created a Help Desk staffed with high level doctors, nurses, and emergency ambulance attendants. So instead of someone just redirecting your call, these were people who could actually solve problems. Give some basic medical advice and, quite honestly, perform the roles of priest, friend, and psychotherapist by just answering the calls from elderly people who felt confined to their homes. “Under the direction of the Prime Minister, we were funded to start a transitional Community Care program where many of our highest risk outpatients could now be cohorted and seen in the community by special community healthcare workers who would go to them, instead of requiring them to come to us. That’s worked out really well. We’re approaching 500 of our most so their hospital stay was longer. Consequently, admission to the hospital was a problem, so we had to develop a short-stay unit attached to Accident and Emergency, when inpatient beds weren’t available for transfer. In order to split into respiratory (possible COVID) and non-respiratory streams (low risk of COVID), we had to take over our hematology, oncology, psychiatry and obstetrics and gynecology outpatient clinics, and other services that we could move out of the hospital to free up space. “We found an offsite annex in Belleville for those clinics and in very short order converted a building that was not purpose designed for that into something that was workable, if not ideal. But we remained really challenged with our inpatient services, which now had a greater demand. Especially in internal medicine, with our specialty staff now being shared with the isolation center at Harrison Point. We had to suspend a lot of elective surgeries and only do