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Idaho hospitals are so overwhelmed with the
surge in coronavirus cases that doctors and nurses have to contact dozens of regional hospitals across the West in hopes of finding places to
transfer individual critical patients.
The situation has grown so bad that the Idaho Department of Health and Wellness
announced Thursday that the entire state is in a hospital resource crisis, permitting medical facilities to ration health care and triage patients.
Kootenai Health, a hospital in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, has already converted a conference room into an overflow Covid unit, started
paying traveling nurses higher ratesand brought in a military medical unit. The hospital received permission from the state to begin rationing care last week. That's all in response to the Covid surge that in recent weeks has taken over much of Idaho — a state with one of the nation's lowest vaccination rates.
"It's just nonstop trying to find placement for these patients and the care that they need," said Brian Whitlock, the president and CEO of the Idaho Hospital Association, who noted that hospitals across the state are struggling with the same issue.
"It really is a minute-by-minute assessment of where beds are open, and hospitals saying we don't know where we're going to put the next one."
Dr. David Pate, a member of Idaho's coronavirus task force and the former president and CEO of St. Luke's Health System in Boise, said that because of how far Idaho's towns are from metropolitan areas, it was common prior to the pandemic for doctors to send their patients to cities like Spokane, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, and other far-flung cities in the region. It often required patients to be taken by plane or helicopter and close coordination between medical facilities.
Now, he said, doctors are being forced to call 30 or more hospitals across multiple states to find a bed for a single patient in hospitals with which they have little to no relationship. Some doctors in Idaho have called as far south as Texas and as far east as Georgia.
"You're taking seven to eight hours to call a bunch of hospitals to see if one will take your patient who might face a time-sensitive emergency," Pate said. "Seven to eight hours might mean that patient won't survive."
Idaho is not alone in pursuing this type of care.
Billings Clinic, a 300-bed hospital in Montana, is considering adopting crisis standards of care as its ICU hits 150 percent capacity. Alaska’s largest hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, said Tuesday that based on its number of patients they had been “forced within our hospital to implement crisis standards of care.”
Meanwhile, hospitals in Wyoming that are not normally equipped with pediatric beds are struggling to address a wave of pediatric illnesses.
Eric Boley, the president of the state's hospital association, said they typically depend on neighboring states to take critically ill kids.
"We really don't have pediatric beds in our state, so we rely on surrounding states to help us with those," he said. "And we're seeing a big uptick in pediatric cases right now."
It's a frustration for health care leaders across the West, as they struggle to get this latest surge under control.
) & convince them that Fox News caused this and justice must be served.
