Hospitals Pushed to Brink as Delta Sparks Hunt for More Staff

(Bloomberg) -- U.S. hospitals are desperately hunting for medical staff as the Covid-19 wave that’s pushing some systems to their breaking point in the South spills into the rest of the country.

More than a dozen states face severe shortages of personnel, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data show. In Texas and Hawaii, hospitals are building tents for extra space. In Florida, the federal government has deployed hundreds of ventilators to Florida in a rare tapping of the Strategic National Stockpile for that equipment.

The scramble comes as hospitals in hard-hit states say they’re reaching surge capacity, canceling elective procedures again and turning away transfer patients, a jolting warning for parts of the country where cases are just beginning to rise again.

“What we’re running short of most critically is staffing,” said Hilton Raethel, chief executive officer of the Healthcare Association of Hawaii, which just contracted for 550 new hospital workers -- mostly nurses -- at a cost of $46 million for eight weeks.

Mississippi could see “failure of the hospital system” within 10 days, Alan Jones, a top official with the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said Wednesday.

Hospitals in the U.S. have admitted an average of 9,700 patients over the past seven days, an increase of 31% from the prior week, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said during a news briefing Thursday.

Those numbers are all the more challenging because hospitals are now contending with a major rush of Covid-19 patients alongside non-Covid traffic that had been returning to normal levels. In many states, commerce and tourism have also staged a comeback, meaning those looking to bring in outside staff will have to compete with leisure travelers for the price of rooms and other transportation.

In 17 states, at least 15% of hospitals are experiencing critical staffing shortages, up from 12 two weeks earlier, HHS data show.

Covid-19 patients still represent less than half of intensive-care unit beds in every state. But hospital administrators fear they won’t have enough staff overall to treat critically ill patients, with our without Covid-19. Many have already had to cancel elective procedures again and turn away transfer patients from other facilities. Some are facing surging waiting times in emergency departments.

Surgeries Delayed

Robert Peltier, chief medical officer with North Oaks Health System in Louisiana, said he would never forget the challenge of telling a recent brain surgery candidate that his procedure would have to wait.

“All this gentlemen could say was, ‘You must have a hard job,’” said Peltier. “This guy was facing something that if he bleeds he is probably not going to make it. He had a time-sensitive procedure that I’m having to cancel.”

The man eventually got his surgery.

Often, hospitals have the beds but not the staffing, especially in some overwhelmed rural areas such as those in Texas, according to Stephen Love, chief executive of Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council. “We already have a very exhausted staff,” Love said.

In the South, hospitalizations have soared far faster than in earlier waves. And even though patients have tended to be somewhat younger, many have gotten so sick that they’ve flooded intensive-care units.

In Florida, some hospitals have already done all they can to retrofit spare space in conference rooms and cafeterias for patients, according to Mary Mayhew, chief executive officer of the Florida Hospital Association.

“Hospitals are aggressively looking at ways to recruit travel nurses through staffing agencies,” she said. “But that is more and more difficult as other states are experiencing increases in Covid hospitalizations.”

She said the facilities in her network continue to face logistical challenges such as ensuring adequate oxygen supplies, given the recent surge in demand. Earlier this week, the Strategic National Stockpile had to deploy 200 ventilators and 100 high-flow nasal cannula kits to the Sunshine State, a type of request that had become rare since the height of the pandemic.

LouAnn Woodward, vice chancellor for health affairs at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said hospitals are sometimes forced to make difficult calls on whether to add beds or not.

“You might just think, ‘OK, well then open them,’” she said. “But things get to a point where you feel like the situation is not safe and you’re not providing the appropriate level of care to the patient.”

Heather Freiheit, a nurse who has been working as a liaison for the U.S. government in hard-hit hospitals, said health-care staff are as tired as they have ever been.

“It’s emotionally draining for health-care providers to have to go in day after day and care for patients,” said Freiheit, who works as an operations officer for the Department of Health and Human Services and is currently deployed in Louisiana, “especially when most of the patients we’re seeing right now are unvaccinated.”

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