‘Buckle up:’ California hospitals expect overwhelming patient demand through February
California’s hospitals already have reached the same capacity they were at during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic last winter. Their staffing is down 20% from last year. And, the omicron variant of COVID-19 continues to spread like wildfire.
Carmela Coyle, who leads the California Hospital Association, said she and other hospital leaders are up against something for which it is virtually impossible to plan, sending up a warning flare to the public during “a state-of-the-state hospital update” for media on Thursday.
“We are all going to have to buckle up,” Coyle said. “We are bracing for a rough several weeks when we are expecting the health care system in California will be overwhelmed based on the experience in the rest of the nation.”
It is generally expected that COVID-19 hospitalizations in California will peak at the end of January and remain at highs through the end of February, Coyle said, and that peak will be almost three times higher than current hospital patient volumes.
That means this year’s peak will be 40% higher than what hospitals expected during the worst period of last year’s pandemic, Coyle said. At the same time, she said, patients are no longer being asked to hold off on medically necessary procedures that were suspended last year.
Hospitals are not immune to any of the labor challenges that other business face, Coyle said, and like other businesses, hospitals have seen many workers decide to quit or retire.
“After two years of an unprecedented pandemic in which health care workers have been there, they have been extraordinary in caring for others but also (have) seen too much in the way of unnecessary disease and the unnecessary deaths of adults and children,” Coyle said. “Our health care workers are suffering. They are suffering burnout. They are suffering depression. Many have chosen to change jobs or retire. And that has left a national shortage of health care workers.”
So, when Coyle said that staffing is 20% down, that percentage does not include workers who are out sick with COVID-19 or out caring for relatives who have it. Based on federal data from the Department of Health and Human Services, Coyle said, California ranks number four in the nation among states facing the most challenging staffing shortages.
“What makes the health care circumstance so critically important is that, right now, it is that health care system that is so needed by the most severely ill,” she said. “The bottom line..., we have far more people in need of care and far fewer people to provide that care, and that means that our capabilities may soon be eclipsed.”
For that reason, Coyle said, hospital leaders are urging the public not to come to emergency rooms to get COVID-19 tests. While hospital leaders share concerns about the lack of availability of testing and hope the state and federal governments will do everything they can to increase the supply, she said, they must preserve the emergency room and other critical hospital resources for those in urgent need.
The Biden-Harris administration announced Thursday that they had purchased 500 million COVID-19 tests to be shipped to the homes of U.S. citizens. The president said his staff also were setting up a website where Americans would be able to order a free test.
Coyle also asked for regulatory flexibility when it comes to nurse-patient ratios and some other mandates to ensure hospitals could care for as many Californians as possible and save lives.
The California Nurses Association, however has repeatedly stated that safe staffing ratios are what save lives, and nurses and other health care workers have condemned guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the California Department of Public Health that allow hospitals to compel employees who have tested positive for COVID-19 to work if they are not showing any signs of the disease. The regulations also allow hospital staff exposed to COVID-19 to come into work if they are asymptomatic.
Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, a registered nurse who serves as one of the presidents of the national nurses union, said the United States is not experiencing a nursing shortage but rather a shortage of nurses willing to risk their licenses or the safety of their patients by working in unsafe conditions imposed by profit-driven employers. These companies want to make these crisis standards and crisis staffing levels part of the “new normal,” a major threat to patients across the country, Triunfo-Cortez said.
Coyle said she doesn’t expect many hospitals to allow COVID-positive employees to work since other staff would have concerns about working near someone who has the virus, but she added that hospitals “are down to crunch time” and must look at every single barrier that keeps them from providing care to people who need it.
This story was originally published January 13, 2022 at 4:59 PM.
