SALT LAKE CITY — University of Utah hospitals say they are canceling what they call non-urgent procedures, because they don’t have enough healthy staff to sufficiently treat their patients.

The University’s chief medical officer, Dr. Russell Vinik, said canceling these procedures is the only way they can control the amount of people coming into the hospital.

The University Hospitals typically schedule from 35 to 40 patients per day for non-urgent procedures. He said that some of those procedures are more critical to perform than others. So they have “stratified” those patients, so that the “least urgent” procedures, or those that are the least time-sensitive, can be rescheduled to a later date.

Cancellations will begin on Wednesday, January 5.  Dr. Vinik said that as of Tuesday, Jan. 4th, they had 12 patients in the emergency department waiting for a bed.

“So we need to make changes soon,” Dr. Vinik said.

“We realize that is very difficult for our patients who were anticipating having a surgery as soon as tomorrow. But unfortunately the conditions have changed quite rapidly, and we’re responding to those so that we can take adequate care of those patients.”

The hospital’s chief of surgery said this will not affect emergency surgeries, nor any outpatient procedure.

Vinik said he doesn’t know how long these cancellations will last, and that the hospital anticipates having to reschedule non-urgent procedures through next week and probably into February.

Simone Seikaly assisted with the writing of this article.