We have operating rooms at B.C. Children's Hospital, and, for example, at Sick Kids and other larger children's hospitals in Ontario. I know less about Alberta, but we have children's operating rooms that are fallow. They are empty. It relates to the fact that we aren't able to staff them. The point was made that you need a full team. You need a surgeon, an anaesthetist, nursing and RTs. There are lots of human resources that go into being able to run an operating room, and you need every critical piece to ensure a safe operative encounter for a child. I would say that we don't really lack in many of our hospitals in physical capacity, but, again, we lack the staffing that's required to safely and efficiently run an operating room.
In terms of our operating room efficiency, what we do notice is that, when we shift the focus from elective care to urgent emergent care.... It's important to realize that throughout this period we have never neglected our obligation to look after children who are in need of urgent surgical care, but if you shift a resource that is intended to be used efficiently electively to support emergency care, instead of running eight elective rooms, you run four, and then you run four urgent rooms. That's where your efficiency really goes down, because you're changing.
In a single day, you may have a heart operation, an orthopaedic operation and an appendectomy, and when you do that, when you're shifting teams in and out of rooms, that's where efficiency really takes a hit. It's a capacity that needs both the guarantee of an elective schedule to run efficiently, but also sufficient capacity so you can get at the patients who are on the wait-list and really dig into those to make reductions in those long wait-lists.