The Covid-19 pandemic has taken a heavy toll on health care. Rural and urban hospitals alike are struggling with high amounts of sick patients and lack of staff to care for them. This has adverse effects on everyone in need of care, whether vaccinated or not.
Consider the example of a 60-year-old who needs a heart valve replacement. The surgery may not happen or, if it does, the process could be complicated by the pandemic. Here are the potential obstacles to optimum care:
Getting in the door. Many hospitals have had to pause elective surgeries. Unless the patient is in serious heart failure, the surgery will have to wait. If our patient is in heart failure and arrives in the emergency department, the wait to be seen may be over 12 hours.
Getting into the operating room. Although elective surgeries may be paused, urgent or emergency procedures aren’t. If the operating rooms are short staffed, the most critical patients get care first. Supply chain issues may limit the stock of prosthetic valves available.
The intensive care unit (ICU). Hospitals have a fixed number of ventilators and respiratory therapists to supervise ventilated patients. In the early days of the pandemic, ICUs were filled to capacity in many hospitals. No ICU bed, no heart valve surgery.
The regular medical/surgical floor. The omicron variant causes less severe respiratory disease than the other variants, which means many infected patients don’t need ICU care. When our heart valve patient is ready to be transferred out of the ICU, they may have to wait until a bed on the floor becomes available.
Discharge. Let’s say our heart valve patient lives alone and needs a short stay in a nursing home. As short-staffed as hospitals are, the situation is even more dire for nursing homes or rehab facilities. The patient may have to stay in the hospital for days until a nursing home bed becomes available. That can significantly increase costs for all payers. Sometimes the patient’s in house long enough to go home; however, if the patient is homeless or has family members who are sick or unvaccinated, the stay can be extended.
The solution is to get Covid under control. We know how it needs to be done: Masking, vaccines, and social distancing. It could be you or a family member who has essential medical care delayed.
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