Re: "Cancer patient faces surgery delay," July 28.
The unfortunate delay in this patient's treatment is precisely because of the operating room closures which occur each summer (and at Christmas and spring break).
These closures were instituted by the hospital administration (then the Greater Victoria Hospital Society) as a cost-saving measure. In a recent discussion I had with the surgeon mentioned in your article, she lamented that she was seeing patients in her office with diagnoses of malignant disease who could not get into the operating room for months, due to the lack of operating room time. The statement by the VIHA spokesperson that "any wait has nothing to do with summertime surgical slowdowns" is false.
I have worked in the Victoria General Hospital operating room for more than 25 years, and when I first was here, summer holidays were available to surgeons and anesthesiologists only if replacement physicians (locum tenentes) were available. New nurses with little seniority virtually never had summer holidays. The institution of summer closures was designed to help meet budget constraints, and always has been. It is true that these closure periods now allow for holiday time to be more widely available to staff, but it is disingenuous for VIHA to claim that the foremost reason for closures is to accommodate staff holidays and that no serious patient care delays occur.
Tim Relf, M.D.
Victoria
