Local hospitals had to turn away patients because of staffing issues and the rise in occupancy levels
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Local hospitals in Mid-Missouri are being affected by the nationwide nurse shortage, as well as the surge of COVID-19 patients, which has resulted in higher occupancy levels and patients being turned away.
Dr. Robin Blount with Boone Health said new nurses join the staff at the hospital every two weeks, but they still have openings. She said the staffing shortage began when the first wave of COVID-19 cases hit the country in the early months of 2020.
"When we had our first big wave of COVID, many nurses quit their regular jobs and started traveling to the hot spots where they were getting paid wages that were way above what they could get locally," Blount said.
Blount said a lot of nurses chose to do travel and work at hot spots for several months before a lot of them saved an adequate amount of money and are able to not work anywhere right now.
"We're at a point now where we try to go out and find agency nurses and we're willing to pay it because we need to, but we can't find enough because they're all somewhere else," Blount said.
Capital Region in Jefferson City said the increased volume of COVID-19 patients has strained staffing resources, but they have been able to manage the surge to this point, but health care teams are fatigued and fearful as cases continue to rise.
Jessica Royston with SSM Health said they recently brought in nearly 20 agency staff to help support our clinical team during this surge and we expect to bring in additional agency staff in the coming weeks.
The trend continues at MU Health Care. A spokesperson said, "Like other health systems throughout the state, we are experiencing continued pressures on our capacity due to the increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations as we continue caring for patients with other acute illnesses."
With the shortage of nurses, Blount said this has also affected the capacity at the hospitals because the hospital will not compromise patient safety by piling on more people to every nurse.
"Unfortunately there have been times when we have been full and it's all the patients we can take care of safely with the number of nurses and techs we have," Blount said.
Blount said the biggest place that patients are turned away is in the ICU because of the special skill set that is required to work in that department and also the limited number of patients that can be cared for at a time because of the acuity level.
In efforts to find other beds for ICU patients, local hospitals have had to look well beyond Mid-Missouri to find an ICU bed for someone. Blount said sometimes this means St. Louis or Kansas City, but depending on their occupancy, other times this has meant Illinois, Iowa or Kansas.
Blount said local hospitals continue to recruit and try to incentivize people to stay, but these issues have made it very difficult to handle the large influx in sick patients.
According to the state Covid-19 dashboard, 2,083 patients are currently hospitalized with Covid-19. Of those patients, 618 are in the ICU, 206 are on ventilators, and the remaining inpatient bed capacity is at just 20%.
In looking at hospitalizations two months ago on June 3, there were 678 patients, on July 3, that number increased by 329 to 1,007, and saw a major uptake by 855 to 1,862.
Blount said cases are mainly among the unvaccinated and primarily in the younger population.
"Although fully vaccinated individuals have contracted COVID, their symptoms are not as severe. COVID-19 Vaccines are free, effective and readily available," said Lindsay Huhman at Capital Region.
