Jan 24, 2022 04:49 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/23/healt...urses.html
EXCERPT: . . . Even as new cases peak and begin to decline in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, the nation’s hospitals are still confronting a crushing influx of patients. In Mississippi, the latest wave of infections has pushed nearly all of the state’s acute-care hospitals to capacity.
At Pascagoula Hospital, the city’s only acute-care health facility, a wave of departures has left 80 unfilled openings for registered nurses, forcing administrators to mothball a third of its beds. By the end of last week, every remaining bed was full, prompting an alarming systemwide backup. With nowhere else to go, coronavirus patients in the I.C.U. who were well enough to move to another unit had to stay put. Also stuck were several gravely ill patients in the E.R. who could not be transferred to the I.C.U., where care is far more exacting.
Lee Bond, Singing River’s chief executive, said the current surge was simply exacerbating a calamitous labor shortage that state hospital leaders and public health officials say will persist long after Omicron fades. “The real crisis we’re facing right now is a foundational shortage of nurses,” he said.
The nation’s frontline medical workers were running on fumes even before the arrival of Omicron. Successive waves of illness and death have left them exhausted and numb; nearly one in five have left the profession over the past two years. And they are angry — at the patients who refuse to get vaccinated, at the hospital executives who won’t spend the money needed to maintain safe nurse-to-patient ratios, and at the political leaders who call them “health care heroes” while opposing mask and vaccine mandates that might blunt the tsunami of new infections.
The labor shortage has been especially brutal for the small, nonprofit safety-net hospitals like Singing River where millions of Americans seek care. Financially fragile even before the pandemic, they have been unable to match the lofty salaries dangled by travel nurse agencies and large health systems, further accelerating the personnel drain that threatens their ability to provide quality care. Travel nurses can make more than $200 an hour, far more than the $30 earned by most staff nurses in Mississippi.
“A lot of community hospitals are wondering how they’re going to keep the lights on,” Tim Moore, president of the Mississippi Hospital Association, said.
The financial strain has been exacerbated by the refusal of Mississippi and other southern states to embrace Medicaid expansion... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: . . . Even as new cases peak and begin to decline in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, the nation’s hospitals are still confronting a crushing influx of patients. In Mississippi, the latest wave of infections has pushed nearly all of the state’s acute-care hospitals to capacity.
At Pascagoula Hospital, the city’s only acute-care health facility, a wave of departures has left 80 unfilled openings for registered nurses, forcing administrators to mothball a third of its beds. By the end of last week, every remaining bed was full, prompting an alarming systemwide backup. With nowhere else to go, coronavirus patients in the I.C.U. who were well enough to move to another unit had to stay put. Also stuck were several gravely ill patients in the E.R. who could not be transferred to the I.C.U., where care is far more exacting.
Lee Bond, Singing River’s chief executive, said the current surge was simply exacerbating a calamitous labor shortage that state hospital leaders and public health officials say will persist long after Omicron fades. “The real crisis we’re facing right now is a foundational shortage of nurses,” he said.
The nation’s frontline medical workers were running on fumes even before the arrival of Omicron. Successive waves of illness and death have left them exhausted and numb; nearly one in five have left the profession over the past two years. And they are angry — at the patients who refuse to get vaccinated, at the hospital executives who won’t spend the money needed to maintain safe nurse-to-patient ratios, and at the political leaders who call them “health care heroes” while opposing mask and vaccine mandates that might blunt the tsunami of new infections.
The labor shortage has been especially brutal for the small, nonprofit safety-net hospitals like Singing River where millions of Americans seek care. Financially fragile even before the pandemic, they have been unable to match the lofty salaries dangled by travel nurse agencies and large health systems, further accelerating the personnel drain that threatens their ability to provide quality care. Travel nurses can make more than $200 an hour, far more than the $30 earned by most staff nurses in Mississippi.
“A lot of community hospitals are wondering how they’re going to keep the lights on,” Tim Moore, president of the Mississippi Hospital Association, said.
The financial strain has been exacerbated by the refusal of Mississippi and other southern states to embrace Medicaid expansion... (MORE - missing details)
