HOSPITALS ARE FULL
VUMC ran out of hospital beds Wednesday, and Dr. Karp believes it will happen again.
“We are converting units as best as we can, we are using units for overnight stays whenever we can, we’re putting patients in short-stay areas whenever we can. All of the hospitals are full and I think this is the message- this is not just Vanderbilt,” he explained.
Vanderbilt, running out of beds, postpones non-urgent surgeries (newschannel5.com)
Damn, that is awful! How many people are sick with the Chink Flu at Vandy Hospital?
Less than four weeks ago VUMC’s 7-hospital system was caring for a total of 10 patients admitted for COVID-19. By Thursday, a total of 83 patients were battling the virus in VUMC hospitals, according to an internal memo.
Wait one second, this hospital, Vanderbilt hospital, the premier and biggest hospital in Tennessee has only 83 beds?
I believe they are trying to bullshit themselves into more funding by participating the COVID Theater of Fear.
The hospitals in Germany DELIBERATELY underreported their number of intensive care beds suited for Covid-patients to get more founding.
I am not surprised.
https://medicine.vumc.org/hospitals#:~:text=The%201%2C000%2Dbed%20Vanderbilt%20University,States%20and%20several%20foreign%20countries.
They have 1,000 beds at the hospital and another 250 at the school of medicine.
They very publicly set up outside beds near their ER last year as a show of how desperate things were. To my knowledge, none of those beds were ever actually used.
VUMC has been one of the biggest pushers of whatever government propaganda about the virus is at the time. I have a list of articles where one of their main experts first says “of course masks don’t work” then moves to “obviously masks work” to “masks are the most effective thing you can do” to “masks are generally unnecessary” and finally back to “even vaccinated people should wear masks pretty much all the time.”
My hospital is “running out of beds” as well. Until you look under the hood. Until recently, the hospital has been putting one patient per room. It’s better for Press-Ganey scores, because patients prefer private rooms. To save space in the COVID units, two patients are being put into a room.
So as of this morning, they are staffing an additional hallway. This will add the capability for 64 more patients.
That is creating an issue now of staffing. Because this is so many more patients than normal, it is requiring more staff to care for them. The hospital doesn’t want to do that for two reasons: hiring permanent staff for a temporary surge in patient numbers is not a good idea from a business sense, and bringing in temporary health workers is expensive, especially when a lot of other hospitals are doing the same thing. So called travelling nurses are making three times what a full time nurse makes. When my son travelled to NYC last year, he was paid $14,000 a week.
Right now we are being offered bonuses that range from $125 a day to $700 a day (depending on your credentials), on top of the overtime way we already get, in order to work extra shifts. I have been working 48 to 60 hours a week for the entire summer. That is so they can avoid bringing in more expensive travellers, who make even more than that.
They mean beds with a nice view through the window. They have plenty of beds without window views. 😉
This is also an admission that once again those in power and the know fialed to take adequate premptive measures abd plan for this if they are “converting units as best as we can”. Seems like it would have been trivial to make more space if you know they planned ahead and committed manpower and resources to it…
Ya know, those administrative offices take up a lot of room!
Hospitals are a for profit industry. Even the charity ones (Shriners springs to mind), have to generate a certain level of revenue in order to cover expenses. A bed that goes empty is a loss of revenue.
Any hospital that is not putting patients into at least 95% of their beds is likely losing money. or at a minimum spending money on assets that will go unused. You don’t fill the bed, you lose that night’s revenue.
In my city, the hospitals (and the Assembly) were all claiming an emergency because they only had about 35% of their beds available. Wait… what? You have 35% of your beds going unused? And that is an emergency? How many beds go empty when there is not a panicdemic? (Hint: I would be surprised if it was more than 5%).
Theater.
I’d say being at 65% capacity would have me worried as being too high, but I also don’t think like a hospital administrator.
Let us not forget all the subsidies, grants, donations, etc these private and for profit businesses get too…
Matt, you’re thinking like a firefighter: “If we have 65% of our companies out on x number of calls, we only have Z companies to devote to a multiple alarm fire.
Better contact neighboring jurisdictions as a heads up, just in case”
In contrast to a hospital administrator:”payroll is our largest line item. If I staff Friday and Saturday night so each nurse has 6 patients, it’ll be fine, because we *NEVER* have a multi car pile up, or several critical od’s/heart attacks/strokes/diabetics/other, on a weekend! Besides, when I come in under budget, it’s bonus time!”
I’m told Monday is always the busiest time since that’s when many of an urban hospitals clientele is coming off of their weekend bender.
Perhaps. My personal experience has been Monday is Work Note Special Day. Saturday and Friday are Bad Judgement On Parade. Evan as a Nursing Supervisor, many many many times I had a chat with my higher ups regarding the lack of excess capacity when (shocker!) ED admitted souls downstream of their fights/mva/fall/other readily foreseeable mishap.
I lost those “chats”.
Until around 0300, when I called for more staff.
THAT was productive!