A senior North Dakota health care senior official said his hospitals do not have staff to deal with the growing number of COVID-19 cases.
“We’re really in crisis,” Doug Griffin, vice president and medical officer at Sanford Health in Fargo, said during a recent briefing in the local press.
“It’s really about staffing. We often call staff who offer large amounts of incentives to work harder … we think this is the most serious staffing situation we’ve ever faced,” Griffin said.
Griffin said his hospital hired at least 150 travel nurses or hired from other areas, and that it could “easily” take 200 to 300 more to have full staff.
The hardships, which he mainly attributes to exhaustion, go beyond nurses and extend to patient services, respiratory therapy, and even “people who draw blood.”
“At some point, even the extra money isn’t necessarily enough to get people to want to work harder. They also have to live their lives,” Griffin said.
During the fall of 2020, “it was our Super Bowl,” Griffin said, and staff stood up to take the opportunity, working long hours trying to save patients ’lives. When the vaccines began to roll out, he said staff thought those days were over.
“Seeing it again brings back painful memories. There is a high level of frustration. Most of these people are not vaccinated … I think a lot of staff members think this could have been avoided. There was no need to be -hi. “Griffin said.
Griffin said Fargo is still about two to three weeks away from maximum COVID cases, but Sanford hospitals have been in condition for weeks due to COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients.
Sanford’s Fargo Hospital is reducing surgical capacity by 30 percent in response. Doctors, in consultation with their patients, make the final decisions about what procedures are delayed, but “it could be your knee replacement, your hernia surgery, even your scheduled heart surgery.”
All staffed ICU beds are full, Griffin said. The average age of hospitalization, including critical care, has dropped to the 1950s, Griffin said, and 90 percent of people hospitalized with COVID-19 are not vaccinated.
Griffin also lamented the region’s low vaccination rate and said the state’s practical approach to begging people to get vaccinated doesn’t work.
“We still have a steady number of people who are rooted, who don’t want to get the vaccine,” Griffin said.