Saskatoon Cancer Centre taking extra precautions to mitigate COVID-19

Saskatchewan now has more than 100 cases of COVID-19, which has people and businesses taking measures to try to stop the spread of the virus.

Many people are doing their part by social distancing and even isolating themselves at home.

Not everyone is able to do that. Cancer patients, who already have compromised immune systems, still need to leave their homes for treatment.

Dr. Julie Stakiw is the medical director at the Saskatoon Cancer Clinic. She says they have put precautions in place to protect those who come to them for their treatments.

“We’ve instituted screening procedures at all of the entrances into the clinic where we’re making sure that anybody who presents with influenza-like symptoms has automatic contact and droplet precautions taken and screened for the need to carry on with COVID testing or not,” said Stakiw.

Stakiw said the clinic is also trying to decrease the footprint of anyone in the building where it can.

“We’ve changed some patient’s appointments to telephone appointments,” said Stakiw. “Right now the patients that do need to be sitting in the clinic, either for a new patient appointment or physical examination, certainly we’ll still bring those patients in, but we’ve certainly decreased the need to bring patients into the clinic by switching to a lot of telephone clinics.”

But of course, not all cancer patients are able to do their appointments by phone. For those who need chemotherapy and radiation treatments, going to the cancer centre is a necessity.

Stakiw says those treatments are still proceeding through this pandemic, so they’ve been proactive in making them as safe as possible.

“For our treatment areas, we have initiated some social distancing, so we had to move our chemo chairs around and we’ve had to spread out the times for some of our radiation treatments so we can safely clean all the equipment and screen appropriately.

Stakiw says because of those measures, some appointments have had to be shifted around a bit. To decrease crowding, they’ve spaced appointments out more so there aren’t a lot of people in waiting rooms before their treatments.

She says that they have had to cancel some screening programs, including those for breast cancer, colorectal cancer and cervical cancer for social distancing purposes as well as to deploy those staff to help out with day-to-day clinical services.

She says once things settle down, those programs will be put back in place.