Hospitals Can't Accept This As 'Normal'

[Nevilledog]

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https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/omicron-surge-hospital-chicago/621455/

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https://archive.fo/Lx6ka

At the height of the recent Omicron surge, Advocate Trinity Hospital, in Chicago, was inundated with patients who spent more than 40 hours in the waiting room, holding tight for a bed in the emergency room, which was itself heaving with people who were waiting for a spot in the intensive-care unit, which was also full. Someone admitted at night might have seen two sunrises before they saw a bed. The hospital received more COVID-19 patients than at any previous point during the pandemic. These patients waited, as did people with other conditions. “We had patients waiting with bacterial infections, surgical problems, you name it … people who were sick to a degree that we’d never keep them waiting in normal conditions,” Michael Anderson, the emergency department’s medical director, told me. That the hospital could be so besieged two years into the pandemic “is something I never thought in my wildest dreams would occur,” Matt Fox, a respiratory therapist, told me.

To see as many patients as quickly as possible, the hospital’s exhausted staff brought intensive care into the emergency room, using portable oxygen tanks sourced from a local company. They brought emergency services into the waiting room, installing catheters and ordering medical tests for people who couldn’t yet be given a bed. They resuscitated a patient who had had a heart attack while still in an ambulance, because there wasn’t anywhere for them to be off-loaded. But between staff shortages that had been getting steadily worse throughout the pandemic and the sheer deluge of sick people, the team simply couldn’t see everyone quickly enough.

During one recent shift when just four nurses were on duty, three of whom had been hired from an agency and were on their first day, a COVID patient went into cardiac arrest in the waiting room, where they had been sitting for 10 hours. “They were talking and in a split second they weren’t,” Berenice Zavala, an emergency-department nurse, told me. Someone checked: no pulse. One nurse leaped to start CPR, while her colleagues tried to put personal protective equipment on her. Somehow, they found a room, which at one point filled with almost every available health-care worker on the floor. The team spent 45 minutes trying to revive the patient. They could not. “It really affected us all. People blamed themselves,” Zavala said. “I’ve never worked under these conditions.”

Advocate Trinity is one of the few remaining health-care institutions that serves the predominantly Black communities of Chicago’s South Side—an area where several hospitals have either closed in recent decades or are now on the verge of doing so. A third of its patients are uninsured or on Medicaid. When the coronavirus arrived, Black Chicagoans were more likely to die from it than white ones; even before the pandemic, they already had shorter lives, poorer health, and fewer health-care services. Hospitals throughout the United States have struggled through the Omicron wave, but Advocate Trinity is America’s health-care system in microcosm. Its shrinking pool of workers is shouldering, at immense personal cost, several generations of inequality and neglect, and two years of a poorly controlled pandemic.

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