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Hospitals in Alabama begin August under-staffed as healthcare worker defections increase and staff morale plummets 18 months after the start of the pandemic.
“They are frustrated. They’re tired and they’re just a little discouraged, ”said Don Williamson, chief of the Alabama Hospital Association.
COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are rising rapidly again in the state. This new wave is caused by the delta variant crossing a state where just over a third of people are fully vaccinated. Alabama’s busy hospitals struggle to compete with the lucrative travel nursing opportunities. Some health workers have left the field altogether.
“It’s hard to find people to work for right now,” Dr Sarah Nafzinger, UAB’s vice president of hospital clinical services, said at a press conference last week.
“When the pandemic started, when you came to work, you didn’t know if you were going to catch a disease that was going to potentially kill you or your family. And it has been very destructive for a lot of people. It was very stressful to deal with, ”she said.
Since then, healthcare workers have worked overtime, put in extra shifts and endured a lot of stress.
“We missed the holidays. We missed family events. We’re really, really tired, ”said Nafzinger.
A quarter of Alabama hospitals reported a critical staff shortage as of July 31, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services.
The shortages do not only reflect nurses and doctors, but also respiratory therapists, food workers and environmental staff. The shortages reached auxiliary positions that proved critical during the pandemic.
“They’ve seen this movie before, they know how it goes, and this time it was almost completely preventable. And so, it creates a lot of frustration that this is really a self-inflicted injury that we are doing. all have to face, ”said Williamson.
These staffing issues come at a difficult time as Alabama added 3,307 new COVID cases on Tuesday, bringing the 7-day state average to over 2,500 for the first time since February.
UAB projections, based on the spread of the Delta variant in southern Alabama, show hospitalizations for COVID-19 could reach 8,000 in the state by the end of August, more than double from last winter’s peak of about 3,000.
“This would be (would be) a number that we have never dealt with before, and that frankly there are no staff resources, at the moment, to manage,” Williamson said, adding that the hospitals in the state were planning how they would coordinate if they became overwhelmed.
Critical care beds and protective gear could also become a problem, Williamson said.
Up to 20% of Alabamians are expected to be quarantined against COVID-19 at the height of the outbreak, further depleting hospital staff, according to the UAB projection. The UAB’s alternative projections, based on the evolution of the Delta variant in the UK and India, show a slower curve that peaks in early autumn.
If necessary, hospitals can bring in nursing students, faculty and other volunteers from the community, such as volunteer health workers, Williamson said.
The DCH Regional Medical Center is already looking for community nurses to take shifts. Spokesman Andy North said during last year’s pandemic, DCH had relied on federal funding to pay mobile nurses. These funds are now exhausted.
“With low vaccination rates and low numbers, we increasingly find ourselves in a situation where we frequently keep hospital patients in the emergency room and reconvert units and prepare our limited staff for COVID care,” he said. declared.
In Foley, southern Alabama, the South Baldwin Regional Medical Center was at 161% of intensive care capacity on Tuesday.
Healthcare workers are already calling in sick with COVID-19. At UAB, there were 260 workers at the height of last winter’s wave. Last week they were around 62, said Dr Nafzinger.
“As I see this number climbing over and over again, I am very concerned that we have a lot of healthcare workers left out, who cannot come to work because of COVID,” she said.
“When we are already facing staffing constraints, I am very concerned that at some point we may not be able to provide the necessary care because we simply do not have enough of staff available to do so, ”she said.
While many healthcare workers in Alabama are vaccinated, some do not want to be vaccinated. At least two major hospitals in the state have said they will require healthcare workers to be vaccinated, St. Vincent Hospitals in Birmingham and Providence Hospital in Mobile. Some healthcare workers in other states have dropped the requirement to vaccinate.
Traci Collins, president of Athens-Limestone Hospital, remembers being told there would be a nursing shortage over 20 years ago when she was a nursing student.
This shortage has arrived and is exacerbated by the pandemic which has taken many of its workers away from the field.
“With COVID, we’ve just seen a lot of unexpected deaths. It’s hard. It’s mentally tough. It’s emotionally draining for people. It’s not something you want to see every day, and some people just go out of health care. “
She said her hospital has lost nurses due to higher paying travel nursing opportunities. She said it gave her long-term hope that public health programs and medical schools across the country would see an increase in the number of applicants.
For the coming weeks, she hopes more Alabamians will choose to be vaccinated.
“People may not get the vaccine, but when they get sick what’s the first thing they’ll do? They will come to your hospital, ”she said, adding that her staff ask COVID patients if they have received the vaccine, and many are saying“ no ”.
“It’s hard when you see that help is available and people are not taking advantage of it. “
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