By Brendan Rees
An extra 140 beds delivered to Casey Hospital earlier this year will be ready as the state’s health system prepares for rising numbers of Covid-19 patients.
It comes Minister for Health Jenny Mikakos announced on Thursday 16 July that all category three elective surgery will be paused to ensure the need for spare beds and workforce capacity.
Ms Mikakos said “more than 1,000 spaces for ICU and critical care beds” have been created or upgraded so they are suitable for coronavirus patients.
Elective surgery will be reduced to no more than 50 per cent of usual activity across all public hospitals and a 75 per cent in private hospitals to free up capacity. Private hospitals can continue to take on public category one and urgent category two surgery.
“Earlier in the year we started to prepare the system for a worst-case scenario to ensure that we had the equipment and resources necessary for our hospitals and ICUs to care for the needs of very ill coronavirus patients,” Ms Mikakos said.
“While we will not see the impacts of the current restrictions for at least another week we are confident that this additional capacity will ensure our health system can successfully manage the second wave of the outbreak.”
In March, the State Government announced 140 hospital beds would open at Casey Hospital’s fast-tracked 128-bed inpatient tower – to ensure the hospital had extra “surge capacity” for coronavirus’s peak. This included a new 12-bed ICU in the tower as part of a $1.9 billion State Government package.
Ms Mikakos said more than 86 million gloves, more than 34 million surgical masks, 1.4 million N95 masks, 2.2 million face shields were now available in Victoria’s warehouse ready to be distributed to health services across the state.
The Health Minister added there were plans to convert 1000 critical care spaces to treat coronavirus cases within hospitals should demand surge.
The State Government has more than 1200 ventilators currently in Victorian health services with “hundreds more ready to deploy in the warehouse if needed and thousands more on order”.
Ms Mikakos also announced $30 million had been spent in the reopening of the former Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, now known as St Vincent’s Hospital on the Park, to prepare an extra 84 beds into the health system.
Premier Daniel Andrews said: “We have thankfully not needed this extra capacity yet and I hope we never will – but we need all Victorians to stay at home to protect our health system and save lives.”
Opposition health spokeswoman Georgie Crozier said Victorians were back in lockdown “not due to bad luck but to the Andrews Government’s bad decisions around hotel quarantine and failures to act quickly on managing clusters”.
“The Chief Health Officer has admitted that Victoria’s second wave of COVID-19 can be traced back to hotel quarantine failures,” she said.
Victoria recorded its worst one-day jump in Covid-19 cases on Thursday 16 July with 317 new cases as well as the deaths of two men aged in their 80s.
According to the state’s figures, active cases in the state are 2128, and the death toll is 29. There are 109 hospital patients with Covid-19, with 29 in intensive care.
Casey’s active cases rose by one to a total 35. Greater Dandenong and Cardinia both dropped by one case to 10 each.
