These last couple of weeks have given us a miniature taste of what a pandemic would be like.
It started off slow, first we noticed that we were seeing a lot more sick elderly, then we noticed our daily census increasing. Then our ratio shifted - normally we see about 1/3 of our daily patients in fast track, so say 50 there and 100 in the main ER, now it is more like 30 in fast track and 170 in the main ER. The hospital was full and we started holding patients. The number of holds and length of time we held them grew every day. Patients were sitting in the lobby 3 to 4 times longer than normal because we had half our normal beds to see way more patients than normal. The patient acuity keeps climbing, normally we admit about 18% of our patients and now we are admitting 25-27%. Then the ER staff started getting sick. So we were seeing more, sicker patients with less beds and less staff.
It wasn't pretty. Toward the end of this week the hospital census evened out and we started holding less people. Hopefully the crisis point is over.
I do know this: There is no way we will every be able to handle a major outbreak and I suspect that most other hospitals are in the same boat. But, in the great American tradition of burying our heads in the sand, I don't suppose anything is going to change.
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- ERnursey
- A hardworking ER nurse trying to survive until retirement and if I can have little fun or have a positive impact on someone's life, all the better!
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9 comments:
Yup - chaos will reign my dear. It will be like Mad Max.
I won't be at work when the pandemic hits. Go ahead, throw stones at me, but I'm not dying at my place of employment. Here, at the Greatest Hospital in the World, we can't handle the everyday stuff anymore, let alone the "Big One." We have no staff, the patients aren't getting good care, and the people at the top don't care. It's freakin' chaos on a good day and I can only imagine what would happen behind closed doors when the pandemic hits.
MJ
"Do more with less" has always been the popular management theme. Now it is "do even more with considerably less, do it with a smile, and above all, remember that patients would rather have a warm blanket and TV remote than high quality care". The bottom has fallen out of the bottom line.
Don't know if you've seen the CDC report on the likely problems with bird flu if it ever hits the US. Really scary. Just the basic numerical things, like running out of respirators and resp techs within days, not having even close to the number of beds, never mind the nurses to care for them.
Mother Jones, I'll bet the administrators won't be there.
Yes it is scary, and whats worse is that the closer I get to being elderly the more I hate getting sick. And If you had ever read my blog it seems like Im sick all the time. Ive tried taking care of myself but somehow I stil get sick. Bless you.
Sounds like it could be exciting!
Reflecting on the "historical perspectives in nursing" module we just went through in class, it seems like this is the field that pulls things together when the excrement hits the rotor.
I think a large enough group of people that are trained to solve problems creatively with science will work something out once the situation becomes bad enough to throw the normal operating procedures out the window, and once the dust settles we'll have learned lessons we couldn't have otherwise. Just like the immune system. Heh.
Sounds like it could be a fun movie if it were told from our perspectives instead of the microbiologists. Running out of people, drafting the patients, running out of equipment, improvising equipment with the help of engineering, running out of meds, collecting a pharmacist / formulary / improvised o-chem lab and putting em to work.
I hope things settle down for you soon. Is this a taste of what is to come for our WInter?
Things like this are why I'm glad to no longer be working at the main campus of the hospital I work for. I'll be quite happy to be over in the off-site data center and away from the nursing floors when Captain Tripps comes to visit.
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