Kansas hospital staffing crisis intensifies as some states deploy National Guard
Kansas doctors say the statewide hospital staffing shortage is reaching critical levels that threaten healthcare outcomes for COVID and non-COVID patients in overcrowded facilities across the state.
“Our biggest challenge by far is staffing because of the sheer numbers of patients we’re trying to care for,” said Kimberly Megow, chief regional medical officer of Wesley hospital’s parent company, HCA, in a video conference hosted by the University of Kansas Health System on Wednesday morning.
“We have already postponed some elective cases in order to redeploy staff, because we are facing not only the highest number of COVID cases we’ve ever seen, but that is in the face of some of the most extreme staffing shortages we’ve ever seen,” Megow said.
Jennifer Schrimsher, a physician at Lawrence Memorial Health, said nurses and other hospital staff are traumatized by the barrage of sickness and death they’ve been exposed to over the last two years.
“Our staff have reached their limit,” Schrimsher said. “We can’t get more staff because we can’t compete with agency pay. We’ve offered insane amounts of overtime. People won’t take it because they can’t. They just mentally or physically cannot anymore, and it is heartbreaking.”
Dr. Richard Watson, an Andover physician and co-founder of LifeSave Mission Control, an online emergency management tool state health officials are using to manage hospital transfers, said the staffing shortage in Kansas hospitals is no longer just a COVID problem.
“We’re rapidly moving away from what is strictly just a COVID crisis, and we realize it’s a real underlying staffing crisis,” Watson said.
He said staff reductions across the board at Kansas hospitals are “killing us right now,” and that nurses are being lured away to other states by agencies offering higher-paying jobs.
“The ability to keep our own nurses is a huge thing, and to make sure that states are in agreement that we’re not going to poach nurses from one state to another. That’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard,” Watson said.
Dr. Sam Antonios, chief clinical officer of Ascension Via Christi’s Wichita hospitals, said his facilities, like others in the state, are dealing with an influx of staff members catching the virus, which is further straining health systems.
“The impact on our staff over the last couple of weeks, we have seen the number of staff that have gotten sick and can’t be at work — it has tripled,” Antonios said.
Dr. Robert Freelove, chief medical officer at Salina Regional Health Center, said this week, a third of his hospital staff is out sick.
“Yesterday, we were making crisis-level decisions on staffing in our ICU in regards to who we were going to let work between employees who were ill,” Freelove said.
He said Salina is routinely refusing transfers from the many rural hospitals it serves as a regional medical center due to the staffing shortage.
“Just yesterday alone, I took three calls from colleagues that I know in different communities begging for an ICU bed, and I had to say no because we have somebody in our ER on a ventilator for about 18 hours, I think, who we couldn’t place in our own ICU because of staffing issues,” Freelove said.
In the last week, states including Ohio, Maryland, Delaware and Georgia have mobilized the National Guard to help hospitals with patient care.
On Wednesday, Megow, Antonios and other medical officers called on the state to issue an emergency declaration that would allow hospitals to house more than their licensed number of patients.
“Having an emergency declaration could provide a pathway for either the national guard or other federal assistance with actual people to come and help with staffing,” Megow said.
Kansas’ previous COVID-19 emergency declaration expired last June after 15 months when Republican lawmakers refused to meet with Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, who was seeking an emergency extension.
This story was originally published January 5, 2022 at 2:50 PM.