The conference center at Kootenai Health Hospital in the city of Coeur d’Alene has become a type of field hospital, with some of its classrooms full of hospital beds where patients receive oxygen or receive antibody treatment. monoclonal, hospital officials said.
In the city’s nearby main building, about 50,000, there are a number of emergency patients receiving care in a converted lobby and others in corridors. Urgent surgeries have been put on hold and some critically ill patients face long waits for intensive care beds.
The hospital is licensed for 200 regular medical beds (not including those designed for children, women giving birth and people suffering from a mental health crisis) and on Wednesday had 218 patients with “media wave,” he said. Jeremy Evans, the COVID-19 incident at the hospital commander.
Meanwhile, about 500 of its nearly 3,600 clinical and staffing sites are vacant, he said, forcing executives to ask administrative staff and others to take on additional jobs, such as cleaning hospital rooms.
The overcrowded hospital is at the epicenter of a coronavirus crisis in the northern part of the state, and where state officials have authorized state “crisis care standards” this week.
This allowed Kootenai Health, where an entire apartment has been converted into a makeshift COVID-19 unit and other hospitals in the region to ration health care during the increase.
Public health officials warn that health rationing could soon spread across the state, forcing already traumatized doctors and nurses to make intense decisions about who will receive care to save them.
Recently confirmed cases of coronavirus infection in Idaho are on the rise and the state now averages more than 950 new cases each day, according to Johns Hopkins University, an increase of more than 41% in the past two weeks.
Idaho is also the last of the U.S. states, with only 45% of residents receiving at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Just under 40% of residents are fully vaccinated, making Idaho the 48th nation compared to other states and Washington, DC
“For the rest of the state, we are dangerously close to crisis care standards,” Idaho Department of Health and Welfare Director Dave Jeppesen warned Tuesday when only nine intensive care beds were available. throughout the state.
The influx of patients has forced Kootenai Health to “do things that were not normal, very out of the ordinary at times,” said the hospital’s chief of staff, Dr. Robert Scoggins.
“Almost every day, at this time, we have heart failure of patients when oxygen levels drop too much and we cannot supply them with enough oxygen,” he said.
Kootenai Health has recently installed a larger oxygen tank to treat all patients. If the number of hospital cases grows, Scoggins said, the hospital’s oxygen supply infrastructure (the actual pipes running through the walls) may not be able to meet demand.
While many of the smaller rural hospitals in northern Idaho have not been forced to ration health care, they often have no place to send their critically ill patients who would normally be transferred to Kootenai Health.
Neighboring Washington state hospitals would normally help overflow, but they are also full of patients, Jeppesen said.
Peter Mundt, a spokesman for Gritman Medical Center in Moscow City, Idaho, said the institution is struggling to find hospital destinations to transport patients with severe heart problems and other non-COVID-19-related conditions.
“Our ability to accommodate non-COVID patients is very tense at the moment,” Mundt said. “Although we are all different hospitals, we usually work together as colleagues and collaborators. We need it to work like a giant system and right now that system is under a lot of tension. ”
In the city of Lewiston, the St. Louis Regional Medical Center Joseph also operates “to the limit of our capacity,” spokeswoman Sam Skinner said.
“Our current situation is worse than ever,” Skinner said. “As we continue to see the increase in COVID-19 in our community, the impact on a hospital can quickly have this undulating effect. Our low community vaccination rates are placing an incredible burden on our community.”
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare moved north and north and central Idaho to crisis designation Monday evening, giving hospitals an ethical and legal template to use while rationing care.
The designation will remain in effect until there are sufficient resources (including staff, hospital beds and equipment or a decrease in the number of patients) to provide normal levels of treatment to all patients.
According to the guidelines, patients receive priority scores based on several factors that affect their likelihood of surviving a health crisis.
People who consider themselves most in need of care and most likely to benefit from them are on the priority lists of scarce resources such as ICU beds.
Other people in great need, but less likely to survive, will be given “comfort care” to help keep them pain-free, whether they succumb to their illnesses or recover.
Other patients with serious but not life-threatening medical problems will be delayed in receiving care until resources are available.
Jeppesen stressed Tuesday that vaccines are the best way to reduce hospital demand. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that complete vaccination with any of the currently available coronavirus vaccines drastically reduces the risk of requiring hospitalization for a coronavirus infection.
State health officials have also asked people not to go to the emergency room to get asymptomatic coronavirus tests or other issues that can be treated at medical consultations, but have said no one should suspend emergency room visits for potentially serious conditions. . They warned people to be prepared to wait for attention.
Idaho hospitals have struggled to fill vacancies in nursing, home maintenance and other health services, in part because some officials have left because they are burned by the pandemic tension and because others have been quarantined because they were exposed to COVID-19.
Late last month, Little called in 220 available medical workers through federal programs and mobilized 150 Idaho National Guard soldiers to help hospitals cope with the strain.