Georgetown Bariatrics

Dr. Eric Smith from Georgetown Bariatrics joins us on Midday Kentucky to talk about the impact of COVID-19 on his business.

3 troy thompson: welcome to midday kentucky, everyone.

I'm troy thompson.

Joining me in the studio today is, of course, dr. eric smith from georgetown bariatrics and advanced surgical services.

Welcome to the show, sir.

Dr. eric smith: thanks for having me, troy.

Troy thompson: well, as everyone can see, we're practicing our safe distance, of course, doing our interviews via zoom.

I want to talk a little bit about how covid-19 has affected you and your patients when it comes to surgeries.

Dr. eric smith: well, obviously, we've been kind of at a hiatus.

We've not been allowed to do any of our elective surgeries and that obviously influences weight loss surgery and bariatric surgery.

This past month, currently, we have started to slowly increase some general surgeries and some things that are outpatient, and starting in june, we'll be back to full speed with a full or schedule of all or elective inpatient and outpatient.

So bariatric surgeries will start at that time.

Troy thompson: well, dr. eric, we all know that there have been restrictions when it comes to visitors coming into the hospitals.

But, first, before i get to that, i do want to ask you, what safety practices are you putting into place for your patients that will be coming in?

Dr. eric smith: we have a ton of very stringent restrictions and criteria that we have to meet, and we've been doing that this entire time.

Something as basic as temperature checks on every person that walks in the hospital, histories of travel and things like that, and those things continue.

And now, as people come into the hospital, those patients go through that as well.

I guess the best thing that i can tell you is we're following all the national and state guidelines that are being recommended from the cdc and our hospitals and our clinics have never been safer and cleaner because of the precautions that we're taking right now.

Troy thompson: it's funny you say that because a few other medical experts that i've been speaking to have said exactly that.

If anything, this has given us an opportunity to be that next step when it comes to sterilization and cleanliness.

I do want to ask you, we have been hearing that there are not a lot of visitors allowed to come to hospitals nationwide.

Things are easing up a little bit for you?

Dr. eric smith: yes.

So that is true, and we just now started allowing visitors to come in for surgery.

In our clinic, we still can't have visitors, but in the hospital when we have procedures performed such as surgery, patients are allowed to have a designated visitor.

They'll be recommended to have a mask or provided a mask.

There's restricted times, and you can see our website for those criteria and the specifications of that.

But we do want patients to know that they can have someone there with them when they come to have their surgery.

Troy thompson: dr. eric.

I want to ask you your professional opinion.

We have seen a lot of conversation, and i'm bringing this particular part up for you because we have discussed it when it comes to morbidly obese and diabetes and heart issues, that's why a lot of people have your type of surgeries, we hear that out there that is a major cause for covid-19 as well.

What do you hear?

Dr. eric smith: well, absolutely, and i think what we need to start focusing on as we start to move through this pandemic and back to getting beyond it is, how do we prevent these things from happening?

We're never going to prevent completely a new infection virus, bacteria.

But what we can do is prevent ourselves from being susceptible, and so much of the attention has been put on age, and that is a risk factor, or the immunocompromised, but the top two risk factors for patients outside of age that make them susceptible to the infection or succumbing to the infection is morbidly obese or diabetes.

Well, that's something we can do something about.

That's what we do every single day.

And so i think we have to prepare ourselves and make ourselves as healthy as possible.

Unfortunately, the state of kentucky, our death rate has been higher than a lot of other states.

That last time i saw we were in the top five based on the number of people who had it versus the number of people that died from it.

And it's because, unfortunately, we're not a really healthy state right now, and we need to work on that.

And that's something that we can do something about.

Troy thompson: that's very scary stats.

Of course, we'll have all that information on our website as well.

Now, i do want to talk to you something about that i just did this morning and there has been medical offices trying to do it over the years, but it's really enforced something called telemedicine.

Are you utilizing that for your patients?

Dr. eric smith: yes, we are.

Obviously, we've had to go to that for our patients when we had very strict restrictions.

But we're going to learn a lot of things through this pandemic.

We're going to learn a lot of things on how we can maybe do things better.

And telemedicine is here to stay.

I believe that it's something that we can use to our advantage, regardless of if we're worried about confection and things like that.

It's convenient for the patients.

And so what we've started to do is to develop protocols of who would qualify for telemedicine visits in the future.

Troy thompson: well, we really appreciate all such great information yet again.

I can't wait to see you again in person.

Dr. eric, thank you for joining us today.

Dr. eric smith: thank you.

Troy thompson: if you want to find out more information there, it all is up on the screen for you.

Dr. eric smith from georgetown bariatrics and advanced surgical services.

We'll be back after this short break.