RENFREW COUNTY (Pembroke) — The Pembroke Regional Hospital (PRH) and its health care team remain committed to providing quality, compassionate care to those who need it, while doing all that is possible to safeguard patients, staff, physicians and the community against the spread of COVID-19.
“We recognize that there is a lot of uncertainty right now and the situation is rapidly evolving, but if people have loved ones being cared for in our hospital or if someone needs to come for treatment, rest assured, we are here to look after the health care needs of our community,” said Pierre Noel, PRH President and CEO.
To stay on top of the latest developments, the hospital’s Incident Management System has been put in place and, in addition to a number of working groups addressing various aspects of care and operations, the hospital’s leaders are meeting daily to evaluate and implement changes being made on a local, regional, provincial and national scale.
The Pembroke Regional Hospital is working closely with partners in Ottawa and the region to ensure that the approach being taken in this situation is planned, coordinated and standardized where possible.
“Given our resources and expertise, our hospital has now been designated as the Regional Admissions Centre for Renfrew County which means that any COVID-19 patients from the County requiring hospitalization will come to us for care and we are preparing for this eventuality,” Mr. Noel said.
With new information coming every day, Mr. Noel said that public updates will continue to be posted on the hospital’s website, Facebook page and Twitter feed. The most recent development is a further restriction on visitors to the hospital. Effective Sunday, March 22 only essential visitors will be allowed with still only one visitor per patient.
Essential visitors are those who, for instance, have a patient who is dying or very ill or undergoing surgery, or the partner of a woman giving birth, or the parent or guardian of an ill child or youth.
These visitors continue to be actively screened. Screening questions include asking visitors about their symptoms, recent travel history outside of Canada and close contact with a case of COVID-19 or close contact with a person with acute respiratory distress who has recently travelled outside of Canada. Those who fail screening will not be permitted to enter.
PRH will also be limiting spiritual care visiting to compassionate and end-of-life cases only and weekly Mass in the hospital’s chapel is being cancelled until further notice.
“In addition to the steps the hospital and the community are taking to slow the spread of COVID-19, compassion and kindness towards one another are really important at a time like this. Please be kind to each other and help out those most in need. We are seeing many examples of this in our hospital and in the community so keep it up, stay safe, be responsible and practice social distancing,” Mr. Noel said.
