Gritman Medical Center details COVID-19’s strain on resources as they remain in contingency standards of care.
Gritman has not yet requested to activate crisis standards of care, continuing to operate under contingency standards of care, as it has for some months now. As resources continue to be stretched increasingly thin due to rising COVID-19 numbers throughout Latah County, the medical center’s ability to maintain contingency status has become jeopardized.
According to a press release from Gritman, contingency standards of care allow for “available space, staff, supplies and standards of care (to) be evaluated on an ongoing basis.” Gritman has remained at this level of care since the early days of the pandemic, not yet needing to move to crisis standards.
“We’ve been at contingent levels of care for some time which means things like staffing limitations, supply limitations, space limitations, limitations of technology or medicines, all of those complicated factors come together to paint a picture of hospital capacity,” Gritman’s Director of Community Relations and Marketing Peter Mundt said.
While the hospital is actively working to recruit additional healthcare personnel, the widespread demand makes it difficult, even with expedited licensure procedures.
“In general, we’re trying to bring on providers, be they doctors or nurse practitioners or any number of physician assistants, medical assistants throughout the organization as we can,” Gritman’s Marketing Content Manager Brad Gary said. “It’s just like everywhere else in the country that there’s a shortage of those providers, but we’re bringing in providers at all levels right now.”
Gary added that while new staff weren’t being taken in on a daily basis, there are “new providers in the works fairly frequently right now.”
According to Mundt, Gritman is currently under its biggest caseload since the pandemic began.
To help combat the increased demand for medical services, Gritman recently set up a patient care unit within the hospital dedicated to COVID-19. Over the last few weeks alone, the care unit has been at capacity several times, Mundt said.
“We are definitely seeing the highest hospitalizations that we’ve seen throughout the pandemic and we’re definitely seeing the greatest demand on our emergency department,” Mundt said, adding that this record demand was also visible at Gritman’s QuickCARE clinics and drive-thru testing sites.
Mundt said this can be attributed in part to the more contagious virus variants that have been circulating that weren’t present in the early spring and summer of last year.
Despite the change in variants, the best way to protect oneself from COVID-19 continues to be vaccination.
“The numbers are clear,” Mundt said. “This variant, this mutation is affecting people who are unvaccinated. We know nationally, by looking at data that’s coming in from around the country, that it is affecting younger people more so than the first waves which were affecting older people.”
According to data compiled by the Public Health – Idaho North Central District, since Sept. 1, Latah County has seen a total of 457 COVID-19 cases, 25.16% of which were ages 18-29, the largest of the measured age demographics. This is a significant increase compared to August, in which Latah County saw 337 total cases. As caseloads continue to increase, hospitals are left with less and less room to provide for non-COVID-19 patients.
“Hospitals still need the ability to provide care for heart attacks and strokes and trauma and delivering babies and all of the other important things that go on in a hospital that are not related to COVID-19,” Mundt said. “Because of this surge, it pulls away from the hospital’s ability to help care for those patients.”
Mundt said that this changed dynamic has altered the degree to which hospitals interact with one another. While hospitals are independent entities, an increasing amount of reliance on neighboring medical facilities has become the reality as patients needing high levels of care have been transferred away from hospitals without the necessary resources for treatment.
“That’s one of the reasons why crisis standards of care have been declared,” Mundt said. “It’s difficult, sometimes impossible to find hospitals that can take a patient.”
In order to manage the trends in hospitalizations, Mundt emphasized that a public effort will have to be made to ensure that healthcare facilities across Idaho are not overburdened.
“We’re holding strong, as strong as we can,” Mundt said. “We’re working together as much as we can because we care so much about this community and our abilities to provide extraordinary care and treatment to everyone who needs it … we just need the public to understand that and hopefully help to do their part to keep the healthcare system working and operating.”
Royce McCandless can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @roycemccandless