More than 600 patients missed out on elective surgeries at the Warrnambool Base Hospital in the last financial year due to COVID-19.

South West Healthcare chief executive officer Craig Fraser said wait lists had been slashed in the first three months of this year.

Thanks to a public-private partnership with Warrnambool's St John of God hospital, an extra 110 surgical patients have been treated compared to the same time last year.

"Elective surgery returned to 85 per cent of normal capacity last September and resumed to 100 per cent in late November," Mr Fraser said.

"The arrangement with St John of God has significantly assisted the full-year impact of the COVID pandemic on surgical activity.

"The demand for both emergency and elective surgery continues to increase and the surgical teams have done a great job in difficult circumstances to get back to normal levels of activity so quickly.

"We're continuing to develop and implement further surgical strategies, that include working with neighbouring health services, to address these challenges."

St John of God acting chief executive and director of nursing Leanne McPherson said the private hospital will continue to help public patients to keep wait times down in the region.

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"We have been working in partnership with the Base doing surgery for them and have an ongoing relationship to be able to keep doing that into the future," she said.

"We have an agreement with them to continue that work.

"When we can help them out we certainly facilitate that and help them with their backlog."

Many surgeons in Warrnambool work across both hospitals and can take patients from the public system when vacancies crop up.

"It's pretty busy in terms of surgeries, we haven't really slowed down except a few weeks last year when everyone was told they had to stop accepting surgeries and only take emergency surgeries.

"There was some impact to private patients who were delayed and surgeons continued to work through their waiting lists and book people."

The hospital has vacant beds and Ms McPherson urged people not to put off health checks.

"Make sure you don't delay delay treatment."

State-of-the-art lighting technology has been installed in three of South West Healthcare's busy operating theatres.

The $150,000 lights have been installed in three theatres, replacing lights installed almost two decades ago in 2002.

The old lights facilitated more than 100,000 procedures.

The new lights come with camera vision that projects the surgery on a screen in the operating room, meaning everyone in the room can closely watch the procedure when not at the operating table.

"Not only does this free-up limited space around the operating table, it provides 'front-row' learning when it comes to being able to clearly watch the finer details of surgical procedures, and the finer details of the human body - such as organs and structures," Mr Fraser said.

"The new technology also provides surgeons with the ability to manage the light on the surgical field by altering its sharpness (hot to cold) and its brightness via a light-fitted sterile handle.

"Until now, the theatre technician or nursing staff have been relied on for this."

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