Wichita Wesley hospital enhances screening to fight COVID-19 coronavirus
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Although it’s had no confirmed cases of the coronavirus known as COVID-19, Wesley Medical Center on Monday announced stepped-up screening efforts to reduce the possibility of spreading the virus.
The hospital has closed all but five of its 57 entrances and is screening all patients, visitors and vendors as they enter the hospital.
The main and emergency room entrances at the main hospital are open 24 hours; the vendor entrance and the entrance to the intensive care area are open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The entrance to the Birth Center, in a separate building, also remains open to the public, hospital officials said.
The hospital also is asking people to limit routine visits to patients. “If you don’t need to come to the hospital, don’t come to the hospital,” said Bill Voloch, Wesley’s president and chief executive.
All people entering the hospital except employees have to pass a three-question screening process at the door.
Those questions include whether they have any flu-like symptoms, such as cough or fever, whether they have been in contact with a person who’s been confirmed to have the coronavirus, or whether they’ve recently returned from any of five countries where there have been major outbreaks of COVID-19, including China, Japan, Italy, South Korea or Iran.
Hospital volunteers continue to work in non-medical areas but for now are not being assigned to treatment floors.
The hospital also has canceled any large-group employee meetings indefinitely and instituted a 30-day ban on travel for employees.
The measures are precautionary at this point because the hospital has yet to see its first case of COVID-19, Voloch said.
Dr. Lowell Ebersole, the chief medical officer at Wesley, said the hospital has had no confirmed cases of COVID-19, but had ordered testing for two patients known as “persons under investigation,” or PUIs.
Wesley has no in-house testing capability for COVID-19, he said.
In the cases where the virus was suspected, the hospital sent test samples to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. The two PUI’s were kept in medical isolation at the hospital until the test results came back, which generally takes 48 to 72 hours, he said. The tests were negative.
There is no vaccine for COVID-19 and no specific treatment that is known to be effective in curing the virus, Ebersole said.
The most common treatments now are proper hydration and addressing any underlying but treatable conditions that can be made worse by the viral infection, Ebersole said.
In cases of severe respiratory distress, oxygen or ventilator therapy may be prescribed, he said.
Ronda Corle, a former Eagle page designer, went to the hospital on Saturday, suspecting that she and her daughter Olivia may have picked up the virus on a trip to Spain.
About 600 cases of the virus have been confirmed in Spain, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
They both became ill on their return to the Kansas City airport, Corle said. They called ahead and went straight to Wesley hospital from Kansas City, she said.
She said they were met at the screening station at the entrance and issued masks, but staff didn’t seem to be sure how to proceed from there.
“They all just stood there going: ‘OK, what do you think we should do?’ ‘Well, we should probably put them in isolation, but where is that going to be, we don’t have anything set up,” she said.
“This is going back and forth and I’m just kind of standing there, pretty incredulous,” Corle said.
They were eventually escorted to a room at the far end of the emergency room. Although a sign was posted warning employees not to enter without a mask, “there were lots of people who came in who didn’t have masks,” she said.
When they saw a doctor, Corle said he told them he could not test them for COVID-19 unless they had traveled from China or Iran.
“Today, I see on the news that they’ve added more countries to that list, but as of Saturday when I walked in, those were the two countries,” she said.
She said he did test for a variety of other infections and one of the tests came back positive for adenovirus, which can cause some of the same symptoms as COVID-19 but isn’t generally as serious, she said.
Ebersole said he couldn’t comment directly on individual cases, but did outline the steps the hospital goes through when a patient comes in with possible COVID-19.
“All patients are screened with the initial screening questionnaire,” he said. “If that is positive, they go to our triage nurse that would have more specific questions.
“Any patient that would screen positive would go to a designated area and then . . . expanded precautions would be implemented. Then the physician would be contacted and they would go through a more robust and thorough investigation into their travel history and possible exposures and their symptoms.”
If that investigation continues to point toward COVID-19, Ebersole said he and an infection prevention specialist would be notified.
“Our infection preventionist will contact KDHE and it is discussed with the staff there and a determination of whether to test the patient for COVID-19 is then made in consultation with KDHE,” he said.
So far, there has been only one confirmed COVID-19 case in Kansas, an Overland Park woman being treated at the University of Kansas Hospital.
“The patient is in a specially equipped area that is designed to prevent the spread of the virus to other patients, visitors, staff and physicians,” KU said.
“This patient did exactly as we’ve been asking the public to do to protect others,” the statement said. “They called ahead to their doctor’s office and the hospital to plan the specimen collection for testing and subsequent care. Upon arrival, caregivers wearing protective personal gear coordinated the patient’s entry into the hospital.”
This story was originally published March 9, 2020 at 3:53 PM with the headline "Wichita Wesley hospital enhances screening to fight COVID-19 coronavirus."
