A public call was made to help people with medical experience at Goshen Health Hospital in Indiana. The CEO wrote in a Facebook post, “We invite you to consider whether you can make a difference.”
The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota has been retiring over the past two weeks, being reassigned to staff from other parts of the country, and 905 employees have been handed over to researchers for patient care after contracting the Covid-19.
And in North Dakota, the governor announced last week that the state would implement “emergency” guidelines to avoid staff shortages so that nurses who test positive for Covid-19 can continue to work, the Grand Forks Herald noted.
COVID-19 patients are pouring into hospitals across the country, with most Americans hospitalized for the disease at any other stage of the epidemic. And after struggling with a shortage of personal protective equipment, intensive care unit beds, ventilators and other equipment, hospitals are now facing a severe shortage to replace resource-health care workers.
“While hospitals may add beds, it is more difficult to bring in additional health care workers, many of whom are experiencing significant emotional and physical toll due to the impact of the epidemic,” said Nancy Foster, vice president of quality and patient safety policy for the American Hospitals Association. Said in a statement.
As of November 18, data from the Department of Health and Human Services, first obtained by the Atlantic, said 18 percent of the country’s hospitals said they had a serious shortage of medical personnel. And 22% say they expect to experience a critical shortage of employees in the coming weeks.
The statistics are even worse in some states. In five states, more than a third of hospitals have staff shortages.
In North Dakota, more than half of the state’s 47 hospitals faced staff shortages last week. And U.S. In the Virgin Islands, two of the island’s hospitals are overflowing, with another facing staff shortages next week.
Six states, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, report that more than 100% of hospitals had severe staff shortages last week and some other states are below 30%.
North Dakota and U.S. In the Virgin Islands, at least half the hospitals are understaffed and another Virgin Islands hospital will sink in the coming weeks.
S.S.M. Alex Garza, chief community health officer at Health, told ABC News Live that hospital staff are two weeks away from the growing number of Covid-19 cases in the St. Louis area.
“Our healthcare heroes have fought valiantly day after day but we have no reserves, we have no backup that we can suddenly come and save the day,” Alex Garza, chief community health officer at SSM Health, said in a recent briefing. Week.
Nurses at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, made the difficult decision to strike last week. Jim Gentile, a registered nurse at St. Mary’s, said they were put in a dangerous situation because many nurses left the hospital for higher-paying jobs, leaving them without enough staff to cope with the extra.
“In two weeks we’ve doubled the number of covid patients in our hospital and we think we’ll have to sound the alarm now because there aren’t enough nurses to take care of the patients,” he told ABC’s Brad Milke on “Get Started Here.” ”
“It simply came to our notice then. It is very dangerous. When a patient comes to the hospital, they are qualified to be a registered nurse to take care of them. If you have a ratio of six to one and they are all covid patients and one is starting to get worse, you will spend the next two hours with that one patient. Those other five patients are ignored behind the glass, behind the isolation room. We can’t see them. It is dangerous. “
Vice President Mike Pence told governors on Monday that the federal government is “ready to roll up our sleeves and meet capacity needs” on staff shortages.
The North Dakota Department of Health announced that 60 Air Force medical personnel are being dispatched to the state. And White House spokesman Michael Bars said more than 2,100 federal medical personnel are on the ground across the country.
In the past two weeks, federal agencies have sent medical personnel to more than 10 states in response to requests for help, the Federal Emergency Management Administration said in a statement on Friday.
Some New York City nurses are also touring parts of the country where New York U.S.C. The virus is more serious in favor of hospitals when it was at the center of a case that helped send hundreds of nurses.
Intermvanthan Healthcare in Utah made the announcement 31 nurses from New York City Were assisting in intensive care, emergency and surgical units across the state. The system is also hiring more than 200 traveling nurses at a press conference on Friday.
But nurses across the country say more employees just don’t need them. They say everyone in communities across the country needs to wear a mask and follow guidelines such as social distance and indoor gatherings to slow the rapid spread of the infection.
CDC studies have shown that in some parts of the country, people who need to wear masks have a lower prevalence of the virus in the community. In Kansas, there has been a 6% reduction in COVID-19 cases in county ordering masks during the summer. But there has been a 100% increase in COVID-19 cases in commandless counties.
The CDC says wearing a face mask protects against exposure to particles that carry the virus to both the person wearing the virus and those with whom they come in contact.
Public health experts say that if 95% of Americans constantly wore face masks it would make it more difficult to spread the virus, possibly preventing as many as 130,000 deaths.
“Everyone says ‘it’s nurse’s year,’ you know, healthcare heroes, and the thing is that we can all be heroes by doing just one small thing and wearing a mask and keeping our six legs. ICU in Idaho The nurse told ABC News.
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