With COVID causing Kansas hospital capacity issues, patient transfers can take hours

With the coronavirus pandemic causing capacity issues and staffing problems at Kansas hospitals, many patients at rural facilities are waiting hours to be transferred to bigger medical centers.

“We will sometimes have to make 10, 15, 20 calls to find bed availability,” said Dr. Richard Watson of Cheyenne Mountain Software, which is working with smaller Kansas hospitals on the logistics of patient transfers. “There have been times where we have had no beds available in Kansas.”

When that happens, they look for beds in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, Colorado and Texas.

Watson spoke on the COVID-19 situation during Tuesday’s Kansas hospital teleconference for the south-central region.

He was joined by Jesse Thomas, who said that before the pandemic, hospital transfers would usually take about an hour. Now, the median time waiting for a crew to arrive is two hours, 34 minutes. In one example, a patient waited five hours, 47 minutes.

“While this is a COVID problem, it’s affecting a lot of non-COVID diagnoses as well,” Watson said. “The people who may be undergoing a heart attack or stroke or septic, they’re experiencing the same waits and problems with finding placement.”

Their chart of referring hospitals showed Ascension Via Christi St. Francis in Wichita with no capacity in floor beds or ICU beds for either COVID or non-COVID patients. At Wesley Medical Center, there was no ICU capacity. Floor bed capacity was listed at critical.

Rock Regional Hospital in Derby, Hutchinson Regional Medical Clinic, Newton Medical Center, Salina Regional Health Center, Hays Medical Center and several other large hospitals in Kansas had no capacity on their floors or in their ICUs, for either COVID patients or non-COVID patients.

“I really do think we’re at a place where, while it seems like there’s a little breathing room, we’re much more fragile than anyone would anticipate,” Watson said. “We’re much too comfortable with how close we are to no capacity.”

The teleconference was accompanied by a regional report from the Kansas Hospital Association.

Wichita’s south-central region had only 12% of its 280 adult staffed ICU beds available — the lowest percentage in the state. The statewide figure was 23%.

About a third of adult staffed ICU beds in the region and across the state were filled with COVID patients. Even more patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 were occupying hospital beds outside of the ICUs.

Wichita’s region had about 325 total patients patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19. Kansas hospitals were treating 1,065 such patients.

More than half of the 31 hospitals in south-central Kansas expect staffing shortages this week, as are more than a third of facilities across the state.

Jon Rolph, a Wichita businessman who hosts the hospital teleconferences, said the numbers represent a snapshot in time from Monday. Hospital statistics fluctuate and may have changed after they were recorded.

Dee Dee Dewell with Ascension Via Christi said staffing shortages are affecting several hospitals in the region. For example, Hutchinson Regional Medical Center has 18 ICU beds, but only enough staff to cover 12 of those. More than two dozen employees at the hospital have missed work because they contracted COVID-19. The facility has had to limit elective surgeries because of lack of staff.

Dr. Sam Antonios, the chief medical officer for Ascension Via Christi, said staff morale has improved significantly thanks to the vaccine. However, not all front-line staff have been vaccinated yet as they await additional allocations.

“We’re grateful and blessed that that’s here,” he said.

While vaccinations have started, those health care workers represent a faction of the community. Additionally, their immunity has not built up as they await the second shots. Wearing face masks and following other public health guidelines is still necessary for the community.

“Just because a vaccine has been introduced to a small fraction of the population doesn’t mean that now we don’t have to take any additional precautions,” Antonios said. “It will be several months before ... we start the conversations about potentially changing some of the public health recommendations that are out there.”

Public health worker Seth Konkel said a positive test rate below 5% would help to reopen the economy, schools and society as a whole. Sedgwick County’s rate is above 15%.

The health system Antonios manages now averages 120-140 patients with COVID-19 every day. He said those are high numbers, but still lower than what the trajectory called for in late October and early November.

“We can’t really say that we saw a significant surge as a result” of Thanksgiving, Antonios said, but there has been a recent increase in emergency department patients with COVID-19. He said it is “premature” to tell whether that is part of the normal fluctuation in hospitalizations, or if it is the start of a surge in hospitalizations connected to holiday gatherings.