Via The Pew Charitable Trusts: With Too Few Nurses, It Won't Take Much to Overwhelm Hospitals This Winter. Excerpt:
Nurse Hannah Drummond routinely must watch patients for hours as they lie in the emergency department, waiting for a hospital bed upstairs. That includes patients so ill they use breathing machines or need hospice or intensive care, she said.
There often aren’t enough nurses to staff every bed at the Asheville, North Carolina, hospital where she works, Drummond said.
“We are barely holding it together now,” she said. “If we have an uptick in [COVID-19] cases—yeah. I have to honestly not think about it, or I cannot sleep at night.”
Even as a new COVID-19 variant starts to spread in the United States, staff shortages have made it impossible for many hospitals to operate at full capacity. That means they’re less prepared to manage an influx of patients this winter, whether those patients have complications from COVID-19 or other significant health problems.
Hospitals nationwide are canceling nonemergency surgeries, struggling to quickly find beds for patients and failing to meet the minimum nurse-patient ratios experts recommend. Some even have had to turn away critical patients. While hospitals are under the most strain in Midwestern and Northeastern states where COVID-19 cases are surging, workforce shortages also are creating problems in Southern states where cases are relatively low—for now.
Hospitals employ about 2% fewer people today than they did in March 2020, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That may not seem like much, but for many facilities, it makes a big difference. Crucially, experienced nurses have been quitting in search of better pay, less stressful jobs and more time with their families. In some cases, they've also sought to avoid required COVID-19 vaccinations.
Last month, about 4% fewer hospital beds were staffed in Michigan than in November 2020, when 21,071 were staffed, according to the Michigan Health and Hospital Association, which advocates for hospitals in the state.
In upstate New York, hospital capacity has shrunk by 10%, The New York Times recently reported. And about 9% fewer intensive care beds were staffed in Colorado last month than the same time last year, according to state data.
A travel nurse at a Midwestern hospital, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from her employer, said that as she moves around the facility, she passes scores of beds that have been blocked off.
“Every single floor, at least, has like five beds that are blocked,” she said. Rooms will be closed even when many people are waiting in the emergency room for admission to that unit, she said, because the hospital doesn’t have enough nurses to staff every bed.
Short-staffed hospitals will be less able to add beds during a surge of COVID-19 or other respiratory viruses this winter.
