Idaho declares statewide hospital resource crisis amid Covid surge - NBC News

The situation has grown so bad that the Idaho Department of Health and Wellness announced Thursday that the entire state is in a hospital resource crisis, permitting medical facilities to ration health care and triage patients.

"It's just nonstop trying to find placement for these patients and the care that they need," said Brian Whitlock, the president and CEO of the Idaho Hospital Association, who noted that hospitals across the state are struggling with the same issue.

“We’ve had to initiate patient placement committees with physicians at our various hospitals to really assess and prioritize — in conversation with these facilities that are wanting to transfer — to really identify who’s at the most risk for higher level of care and what can be managed where they’re at and what cannot be managed where they’re at,” said Peg Currie, the chief operating officer at Providence Health Care in Spokane, Washington, which is a 40-minute drive from Coeur d’Alene and Kootenai Health.

Doug White, the director of the University of Pittsburgh's Program on Ethics and Decision Making in Critical Illness, said that while Washington's health care services may feel a moral obligation to help, the need for action falls to Idaho's state government.

"Medical practice is regulated at the state level, public health interventions come at the state level, and so in an emergency like this, I do think that the state lines become very important because what we're seeing is these very stark differences between how Washington state has responded to the pandemic and how Idaho has responded to the pandemic," he said, noting that Washington's aggressive safety measures came at some cost to the state.

The challenge of transfers added to the pressure for Idaho to establish crisis standards of care, which means doctors can triage patients dependent on bed space availability and health care workers without specific training can be brought in to work in the ICU.

For Idaho's health leaders, the number of hospital transfers that Kootenai Health had to decline because of the Covid surge crystalized the need to change care standards last week.

A regional transfer hub for patients in urgent need of critical care — typically things like car accidents, heart attacks and strokes — Kootenai Health has had to turn down 392 patient transfer requests in the month of August because of their number of Covid patients.

Kootenai Health is not the only hospital that is establishing these new care standards and northern Idaho is not the only part of the state that may be implementing them.

Earlier this week, he said crisis standards of care were “imminent” for hospitals in the rest of the state given that Idaho continues to set new records for hospitalizations and patients in the intensive care unit and on ventilators due to Covid.

Under critical standards of care, the state allows health care providers to make difficult decisions about how to allocate and use scarce medical resources.

Alaska’s largest hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, said Tuesday that based on its number of patients they had been “forced within our hospital to implement crisis standards of care.”