Dan Florizone hopes this week is the final time he cancels surgeries to ease the demand for Saskatoon hospital beds.

The Saskatoon Health Region president and CEO told media Wednesday the region has cancelled all surgeries — 14 in total — that aren't cancer-related or considered emergencies this week as part of a 14-day experiment to find a long-term solution to overcapacity in the city’s hospitals.

“I don’t want to end up cancelling surgeries again,” Florizone told reporters at Royal University Hospital. “We owe an apology to the families, to the patients. It’s totally unacceptable to have cancellations.”

Health region employees are overworked and hospitals are overcapacity, Florizone said. Staff are worried the situation will carry on, with no long-term solution to ease concerns.

“They were deeply concerned that this has now become the new status quo, the new way of doing things.”

Florizone elected to halt regular health region activities — such as regular meetings — for a two-week period starting Tuesday to allow staff and managers to bring in new patient-care ideas.

Surgeries will resume Monday but the experiment, dubbed The Better Every Day 14-Day Challenge, will continue until Feb. 16. All patients whose surgeries were cancelled this week were notified.

The 14-day trial will see six teams, led by various health region vice-presidents, tackle issues such as unnecessary emergency admissions or seasonal trends in health care demands — such as an increase in hospital usage during influenza season.

He’s told employees, “What you need, you’ll get.”

Processes that normally could take weeks or months to be approved by the health region will take just hours or minutes, Florizone said.

The short-term nature of the experiment means the region can better observe numerous long-term solutions and their potential costs.

“What you can do in a short cycle costs far less than what you do in terms of implementing something everywhere, all at once, full scale,” he said.

The first day of the experiment, for example, showed that 50 per cent of emergency admissions from long-term care facilities could be dealt with at the long-term care centres, according to Florizone.

He expects the region to release a full report following the experiment’s conclusion.

The health region will be providing updates throughout the 14-day trial on its website.