Minnesota hospitals face capacity challenges for second Thanksgiving in a row - KSTP

Jess Boland, a critical care physician at Mercy Hospital.

“Our ICU has been at capacity a lot and at least half of those folks have been people whose primary issue is COVID respiratory failure,” she said.

There are 39 non-ICU adult hospital beds available.

In the Northeast region of the state, there are zero adult ICU beds available.

In the Central Region, there are two adult ICU beds available.

One of the things that COVID vaccinations are best at is preventing people from getting critically ill.”.

“Staffing is a huge, huge issue,” said Boland.

“It takes a lot of time to train somebody who can be a critical care nurse and on our team […] the turnaround of increasing our pool of people who are really good at critical care delivery is years.”.

“They're having less time between calls to rest, to eat,” said Callahan|

“These hospitals are at capacity or above and that's definitely affecting the throughput of those patients, and then that trickles downstream to our crews and causes a little bit of backup too at times,” said Callahan

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