The South Shore Regional Hospital will shut down its secondary COVID-19 Assessment Unit today due to low usage.
The Nova Scotia Health Authority has confirmed a tip shared by a source within the hospital about the unit’s closure.
Brendan Elliott, senior advisor and media relations for the NSHA, said patients in need of secondary treatment will instead visit the Emergency Department if needed while still following guidelines and restrictions.
“These units would treat symptomatic patients who may require IV fluids or monitoring, but they’d go home after getting that work done,” he said.
“The reason we felt we could do that at that hospital is the usage volumes at these secondary units are very low. These units are separate from our in-patient COVID-19 units we have in our regional hospitals.”
Elliott said he is unaware if other hospitals across the province are doing the same at this time.
However, restrictions in relation to COVID-19 in Nova Scotia hospitals will not being changing right now, he said, and visitor access is still restricted.
The Western region of Nova Scotia currently has 54 of confirmed cases. Elliott couldn’t comment on exactly how long it has been since the region has seen a new case, but did say “It has been quite a while.”
