Thank you very much.
I'll give you a bit of an introduction to Southlake and our role in Ontario, and then I want to talk about our experience with COVID-19.
We have over 525 beds. This is one of the largest hospitals in Ontario. We're located in Newmarket, which is 30 minutes north of Toronto. We provide community hospital services to a large catchment in York and southern Simcoe, as well as regional tertiary programs such as cancer care and cardiac care. We have the third-largest cardiac program in Ontario.
We've had quite an experience with COVID-19. We have seen quite an impact in our GTA hospitals. That impact has taught us many lessons. I'd like to talk a bit about those lessons and also about what some of the bright sides of this have been.
Just to give you an example of where we've been, we initiated an incident management team and an emergency operations centre in late January. This was earlier than most, and that was very helpful to us, because we started to anticipate the kinds of things that we would have to get up and running.
We had a daily emergency operation centre meeting. We staffed that for many hours a day, and we had many managers, administrators, physician leaders and others working many hours. We held daily town halls with staff and sent out a lot of information to our staff. There's no question that transparency in communication at both the local level and the provincial level, and also at a federal level, has made a big difference through this pandemic response.
One of the things we did is that we were very transparent in posting our volumes, what kinds of personal protective equipment inventory we had and our projections. We developed a logistic regression model to project demand for intensive care unit beds and also modelled the local epidemiological reproduction rate in our catchment areas to support our response.
We had our first patient in the ICU on March 16, which was five days after the pandemic was declared by the WHO. As of today, we've had 88 patients with COVID-19 admitted to our ICU and our wards, and we unfortunately have had 22 deaths.
Starting in mid-March, we developed a drive-through assessment centre. We've tested literally thousands of patients, both at that centre and as outreach to our long-term care and retirement homes in congregate settings within our catchment. We most recently have become one of the first two hospitals in Ontario that were ordered by the Ministry of Long-Term Care, under a mandatory management order, to take over the management of a long-term care home in outbreak.
With that as the background, I want to talk about a few things that were our biggest challenges and where we believe the federal government can have some role.
The first one is in procurement supply chains and PPE. There is no question that one of the most stressful aspects of COVID-19 and our response has been PPE availability. It's clear that our current just-in-time procurement and delivery approach in Ontario—and I know that it is pretty common throughout the provinces, as I've also spent a lot of my career in B.C.—needs to be fundamentally reviewed.
The pandemic stockpiles that were present federally and in some provinces, including Ontario, and that were in place for SARS were allowed to expire. That not only resulted in a lot of expensive stock not being able to be used, but it also created a scenario where we were critically short when we should have been prepared. One of the recommendations we have around this is that the federal government and the provinces work together to rotate pandemic stock with the regular supply chain to prevent expiry, so that we will be ready the next time something like this happens.
Those shortages not only created sleepless nights but also created a lot of challenges around the time and effort to manage, count, order and go back and forth with central supply chains and numerous vendors directly to reconcile and model our PPE supply. This was a massive, massive amount of labour and time, and the churn of changes in terms of strategy and approach to PPE left significant levels of stress in morale. We have to study what we've done with that and make some changes for the future.
Long-term care is the other area where I have some advice and counsel. We have known for many years that the long-term care model we have in Ontario, but also across other jurisdictions in other provinces, has significant flaws. Those were clearly illuminated during COVID-19.
A lack of sufficient oversight, inspection and integration with the rest of the system have created substantial issues for many homes. Many of these homes are very outdated, very old and very crowded. It is almost impossible to prevent outbreaks in these situations.
There is lack of training for staff, a lack of staff in some cases and a lack of management capacity in many cases. One of the things that would be of help is to have national standards for long-term care, very similar to what we have in other hospital jurisdictions.
We also need some very fast capital investments. Many of these homes simply cannot operate the way they need to operate during an outbreak because of their size and the problems they have with infection control.
I want to talk about hospital capacity. There's no doubt that hospitals across Canada, and it doesn't matter which province you're in, have been operating at over 100% capacity even well before COVID-19. Further to the comments by my radiologist colleagues, one of the challenges with working over capacity is the only way you can recoup capacity to deal with a pandemic like this is to cancel elective procedures.
Our hospital went down to 30% of our normal volume. We've modelled that for hip and knee replacements alone it could take us seven years to recoup the number of surgeries we would need to do if we don't work evenings, weekends and everything else. Of course, the problem with that is human resources. As one of my other colleagues mentioned, they are pretty burned out. To try to get them to work those extra hours, even if we were funded for it, would be very difficult. Once again, we need to rethink our hospital sector.
I'll mention bright spots very quickly. Virtual care has been a really bright spot. After years of painfully slow uptake in Ontario and other provinces, this pandemic triggered widespread adoption of virtual care. We realize now we don't need to go back to exactly the way we were doing things. We will be able to convert a substantial number of visits, particularly ambulatory visits, to virtual care.
We've also noticed the good collaboration we have had between the hospital sector and some of the other sectors has helped us, but that is not widespread. There needs to be a move toward better integration across all provinces and certainly within all sectors. That amount of integration, something we had here in Ontario through Ontario Health Teams, was very helpful.
Last, I want to extend a very big thank you to our communities. Throughout this pandemic, our staff and physicians have been continually bolstered by an unprecedented outpouring of support from the communities we serve. For people who are very tired and overwhelmed, and in some cases experiencing some level of PTSD, that amount of support was incredibly helpful, and we were incredibly grateful for it.
I will leave it at that and wait for questions.