Submitted by Olympia Orthopaedic Associates
To our valued patients,
No doubt you are aware of the current situation in Washington state concerning the COVID-19, or coronavirus, pandemic. As partners in this community, Oly Ortho feels it is vitally important to evaluate our operations in the best interest of our patients, our staff, and our community.
It is clear that hospitals are being taxed with critically ill patients, and this is only going to increase in the near future. They are running out of space AND are tight on supplies. In addition, with school closures, many of our staff are unable to come into our facilities to work. In order to help keep the hospital focused on their priority and to help limit our consumption of necessary safety supplies, Oly Ortho will be taking the following steps:
- All elective cases at the hospitals will be cancelled, per their notification to us. Our surgeons will remain available to help with trauma and emergent cases in the hospital as those needs arise.
- At our surgery center, we will be moving up urgent cases to high priority and getting them in as soon as possible. This means that if you have an elective surgery scheduled in our surgery center, your case may be cancelled until we are able to reschedule to a later date.
- Our clinics will be ramping up our capability to do more telemedicine visits so that patients do not need to unnecessarily come into a busy clinic.
- Patients will be screened prior to entering the clinic to look for symptoms or COVID-19 risk factors, including taking of temperature.
- Our clinics will be triaging appointments to limit the number of patients coming into our clinics.
- Non-urgent new patient may be asked to wait until our resources have increased.
- Our Rapid Orthopaedic Clinic (ROC) will remain open to alleviate ortho patients needing to go to the Emergency Room while they are already being stretched. If you have an acute injury that needs to be attended to, please call 360-754-7622 to be triaged prior to coming in. We also may be able to treat some injuries via telemedicine.
Finally, we want to acknowledge that arranging for care and surgery is a big deal and we don’t take the need to cancel lightly. We are in uncharted territory right now as a community and country. Oly Ortho would like to err on the side of caution. Our patients, staff, and community are of utmost importance to us. Should you have questions, please refer to our website at www.olyortho.com for updates on our COVID-19 response.
Sincerely,
William Peterson, M.D., Managing Partner
Ben Shah, CEO
