TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW) - Each morning in recent months, leaders from every aspect of Stormont Vail Health in Topeka gather for a wake-up call on the reality of the growing COVID-19 situation.
Dr. Robert Kenagy, Stormont’s President and CEO, said the facility was caring for 62 COVID-positive patients Tuesday. They set a high of 54 just a day earlier. At one point Tuesday, they had only one intensive care bed available. Kenagy and other hospital leaders then heard each area outline their resources, and the demand.
It’s the start of piecing together the puzzle that is patient care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The numbers change minute-to-minute, and, along with it, how they’re able to respond to the community’s needs.
“(We are) shifting staff back and forth, opening up as many beds as possible,” Kenagy said.
Stormont, like most hospitals around Kansas, is caring for more patients, both overall and with COVID. Part of the issue is COVID patients typically stay longer, and need greater monitoring. With no visitors allowed, Carol Perry, RN, Stormont’s Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer, said nurses often function as both family and health care provider, and find themselves in the role of communicator, with PPE making it difficult to hear.
“The care for the patient is much more intense for the staff and what you’re doing,” Perry said.
Plus, more staff are out of the workplace. Stormont is averaging nearly 50 absences a day. Some workers are sick themselves, while others are quarantined or dealing with child care or schooling issues. Perry says most of the exposure has happened in the community, not the workplace.
“The ability to know your staff is going to be here has become very fragile,” Perry said. “(Tuesday) morning, we were five RNs short in (medical/surgery). Each RN takes between five and six patients. So right there, that cuts our capacity 25 to 30 patients that we’re able to take care of.”
Perry says staff has cross trained and shifted to cover other areas.
“I have never been more grateful and thankful for our staff. Really, the entire organization have been asked to step outside of what we normally do,” Perry said.
The impact spreads beyond Topeka. Stormont is a regional center, taking patients transferred from smaller facilities.
“(Monday), we had 18 people we could not accept. Nine of them were COVID-positive patients,” Kenagy said, adding they received calls from Oklahoma, Missouri, and facilities they’d never heard from before.
Perry said it’s tough to turn down those facilities when they’ve developed relationships with them over the years.
“It’s very difficult to say no when you’ve always said yes, and you work to say yes,” she said. “You want them to trust you with their patients, with their community members, and all of a sudden you can’t accept them. It’s very hard.”
Stormont is finalizing contingencies, which could include stopping some elective procedures. However, they’re being cautious.
“There are lessons learned from the first go round when we stopped elective procedures (last spring)," Kenagy said. “We had people delaying their care for their heart attacks, or delaying their care for their strokes, and that can’t happen again. Those people suffered for it. We know that when we stopped elective procedures, that when we restarted them, there was a huge backlog of people needing to get care that was very difficult to service.”
Kenagy stresses immediate needs are being met. He said people are not being turned away from emergency care or their doctors offices, but they want people to realize it’s no longer a question of whether a crisis will arrive.
“It is happening,” he said. “It is real time, right now, completely stressing the capacity of our health care system.”
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November 11, 2020 at 06:48AM
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Inside Stormont Vail's Command Center: The puzzle of patient care during COVID-19 - WIBW
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