Page 42 - BusinessWest January 10, 2022
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 lic Health’s (DPH) guidance to hospitals concern- ing non-essential, elective, invasive procedures, which took effect Dec. 22.
“To preserve healthcare personnel resources, all hospitals are directed to postpone or cancel all non-essential elective procedures likely to result in inpatient admission in order to maintain and increase inpatient capacity,” the guidance reads. “Patients are reminded to still seek neces-
“We started seeing people come back over the summer and fall, and now we’re back to telling people to stay away.”
sary care at their hospital or from their healthcare provider.”
The guidance comes as the Omicron variant has pushed hospitals to capacity limits with a new COVID surge.
“Hospital capacity is stretched more than it has ever been since the beginning of the health- care emergency,” Massachusetts Health & Hospi- tal Assoc. (MHA) President and CEO Steve Walsh said in recent testimony to the state Legislature. “After two years of fighting this virus, our caregiv- ers are simply exhausted.”
He acknowledged that “some of these pres- sures, we feel, are not COVID-related and may have also been mounting for several months.” Still, a strained healthcare workforce is facing a staffing shortage that has contributed to the loss of approximately 500 medical/surgical and ICU
hospital beds since the beginning of the year. Still, Hatiras questions the wisdom of simply
assuming caregivers can be efficiently redeployed to other tasks.
“The idea is that, if we don’t do these surgeries, it opens up resources to redeploy in the hospital. But we know that’s not so easily done. You can free up nurse, but in a lot of cases, there’s not a whole lot they can do. It’s not like they can sud- denly be an ER nurse or an ICU nurse. There are a lot of issues around that in terms of training and competencies. So the value of actually redeploy- ing staff is somewhat questionable.”
He suggested what might work better is to issue the guidance as an advisory. “We can advise hospitals to find ways to create capacity. At the end of the day, there’s not a single hospital that would leave a patient untreated because they’re going to schedule a plastic surgery ahead of that patient. What we really need is more staff, which we don’t have.”
Dr. Robert Roose, medical director of Mercy Medical Center, said his team takes pride in car- ing for all the needs of the community, so the DPH guidance poses a challenge.
“It is important for us, from a mission perspec- tive as well as from an operations perspective, to be able to be there when patients need us, wheth- er for emergency care or non-emergency care,” he said. “All types of care across the continuum sup- port individuals’ well-being and wellness.”
That said, “Governor Baker and the Depart- ment of Public Health have issued an executive order for hospitals to suspend non-emergency procedures that could result in an inpatient stay. In order for us to fulfill our obligations as a hos- pital, we are, of course, complying with those
Dr. Robert Roose says treating all patients, urgent and non- urgent cases alike, is part of Mercy’s mission, but it will abide by the state’s guidance.
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