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Oregon’s hospitals are struggling, with weeks to go in the respiratory illness season - Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon’s hospitals are struggling, with weeks to go in the respiratory illness season - Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon’s hospitals are struggling, with weeks to go in the respiratory illness season - Oregon Public Broadcasting
Dec 02, 2022 2 mins, 0 secs

In Southern Oregon, a small coastal hospital has declared that it is operating under crisis standards of care this week as it struggles to manage patients who need urgent surgery and cardiac care.

“The health care system in our community is constrained,” said Virginia Williams, CEO of Curry General, the Southern Oregon hospital that declared the crisis.

Curry General largely serves an older population, not children, and it made the crisis care announcement after surges of adult patients came into its emergency department and staff had difficulty finding places to transfer adults who needed a higher level of care.

The emergency department there stabilizes the sickest patients until they can be transferred elsewhere in the region, typically patients are transferred to Bay Area Hospital in Coos Bay or one of Asante’s hospitals in the Rogue Valley that provide intensive care and more specialized services.

With emergency departments and hospital beds filling up around the state, the time it takes to get patient transfer requests approved has grown “exponentially,” said Curry General CEO Virginia Williams.

The hospital is particularly concerned about patients who need cardiac care.

Curry General can stabilize cardiac patients, but does not have a cardiac catheter lab, meaning it is unable to diagnose or remove blockages in arteries or perform procedures like heart surgery or placing a stent.

But this week, one cardiac patient at Curry General waited for 54 hours before getting a transfer to a hospital that could provide a higher level of care.

“Despite the best effort and fantastic training of everyone that works in my hospital, it would be untrue to say that I can provide the same level of care to patients as I would have in 2018,” he said.

OHSU’s Doernbecher Children’s hospital and Legacy’s Randall Children’s hospital have added dozens more beds for the sickest children by converting single rooms into doubles in their pediatric intensive care units.

At Randall, only about 10% of patients who are evaluated in the emergency department are admitted to the hospital.

Wendy Hasson, medical director of the pediatric intensive care unit at Randall, said it is crucially important for parents to understand that children should not be brought to the emergency department solely because they have been exposed to RSV and parents desire a test.

Teens in mental health crisis – the state’s other major pediatric hospital population – are having to wait for care

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

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