Hospitals cut beds as nurses fall ill with Kovid-19

Hospitals are leaving beds empty because facilities don’t have enough staff to safely care for patients, and a tight labor market has made replacement difficult.

Staffing shortages prompted the Mass General Brigham Hospital system in Boston to keep 83 beds empty on Friday. The University Hospitals system in Ohio recently closed 16% of its intensive-care beds, while the Parkland Health and Hospital System in Dallas closed 30 of 900 beds.

“It’s certainly a brutal situation,” said Dr. Joseph Chang, Parkland’s chief medical officer, in which more than 500 of the 14,00 employees were sick in a single day recently.

Hospitals, doctors and health officials say limiting capacity is the last resort. Facilities do this to maintain the proper care and safety of current patients, although this means leaving people in limbo in emergency rooms, waiting for ambulances, and postponing treatment for cancer, heart disease, and other conditions.

Meanwhile, some hospitals say they are asking doctors to discharge patients as soon as possible to free up beds, asking remaining staff to work overtime, hiring any available temporary nurses. and enlisting volunteers and relief workers, including members of the National Guard.

“We are living in a world of trade-offs,” said Ron Walls, chief operating officer at Mass General Brigham, with 2,000 of its 82,000 employees who tested positive for COVID-19 during the 10 days ending January 4.

Hospitals’ turn to last-ditch measures comes as other important employers, from airlines to police and fire departments, also struggle with workers calling in sick.

The number of hospitals voluntarily reporting critical staffing shortfalls to the federal government climbed nearly 9% between New Year’s Eve and January 6, to 1,285 hospitals. How many hospital workers are calling sick and the number of beds lost are not available nationally, as those figures are not specified in data from the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Doctors and hospital officials interviewed by The Wall Street Journal said they had recently cut capacity by between 3% and 10% due to staff shortages.

Members of the Association of American Medical Colleges, a trade group for medical schools and teaching hospitals, report that 5% to 7% of workers are ill with COVID-19, said Janice Orlowski, the association’s chief health care officer.

“They’re a huge number when you’re talking about the staff of a hospital,” Dr. Orlowski said.

Early research suggests that Omicron infections tend to be milder than in earlier cases. Yet the variant appears to be more contagious, meaning more people are getting infected and arriving at hospitals with severe illness.

This month, the District of Columbia and 14 states, including New York and Illinois, have reported record numbers of hospital patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19, according to HHS.

At 26 hospitals in Illinois and Wisconsin owned by Advocate Aurora Health, the number of patients with COVID-19 recently rose to a record, after doubling in the past month, said Mary Beth Kingston, the system’s chief nursing officer. The system hit a record 1,224 on December 29, and since then the number had risen to 1,648 by Saturday.

Roughly 92% of those patients are illiterate, partially vaccinated or due to booster shots, he said.

Employees calling in sick have also worsened staffing conditions, she said, with some nurses retiring early or working for travel-nurse agencies that jeopardize high salaries.

As of January 5, approximately 1% of Advocate Aurora’s 75,000 employees, including about 430 clinical staff, were off work due to COVID-19.

Dr. Kingston said that to help address the shortfalls, the system hired some temporary nurses, and staff took on additional shifts. Yet the system still had 50 beds closed as of Friday at Advocate Trinity Hospital in Chicago and nearby Advocate South Suburban Hospital.

Hospital officials say the staff shortage eased somewhat with the change in late December to the Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for COVID-19 isolation. The CDC cut its recommended isolation time in half to five days.

The move allows employees who have previously been infected to return to work. However, the hospital system continues to report sick hundreds or even thousands of workers on any given day.

Robert Wyllie, the system’s chief of medical operations, said about 3,000 of the Cleveland Clinic’s 52,000 employees in Ohio and Florida were sick every day on average last week. So far, it hasn’t had to close any beds, partly because the Ohio National Guard has deployed 220 members to help fill in.

Cleveland-based University Hospitals said about 2% of its nearly 30,000 employees are home sick daily. Paul Hinchey, a physician and president of the system’s Community Delivery Network, said the system redeployed remaining staff and moved some patients to hospitals to relieve stress, but that was not enough.

“Patients keep coming,” he said.