After pleas from hospital officials, Kelly announces new COVID-19 emergency in Kansas
Kansas has once again entered a state of emergency as COVID-19 patients threaten to overwhelm hospitals struggling with staffing shortages nearly two years into the pandemic.
Gov. Laura Kelly issued a new disaster declaration on Thursday, suspending a series of rules and regulations to help health care facilities respond more rapidly to the rising demand for care.
Kelly said she would work with the Legislature when it returned next week to pass legislation extending the executive orders through March. The state of emergency will expire after 15 days without approval from the Legislature.
“This disaster declaration provides a 15-day solution to give our front-line health care workers the support they need as they battle this COVID-19 surge,” Kelly said in a statement.
Legislative leaders, who have the authority to revoke the executive orders, will meet on Friday. In statements Thursday, however, they indicated a willingness to leave the directives in place.
Health care facilities are highly-regulated environments. The orders at their core are designed to allow a wider range of personnel to more easily help in caring for patients.
The regulations will, for example, enable physician assistants to provide patient care without formal agreements with physicians. Licensed practical nurses will be able to work with less supervision. Medical students will be permitted to assist at facilities under strain.
“Is it ideal? No. But it’s better than what’s currently going on where people are not getting treated,” Kelly said in a late afternoon news conference.
The announcement came the day after 18 hospital administrators and other health leaders from across Kansas outlined the pandemic’s current dire trajectory and asked for help.
In a remarkable news conference Wednesday, they described gridlocked emergency rooms, a lack of hospital beds and staffing shortages as record numbers of employees call in sick. Patients are dying in emergency rooms, they said, while waiting to be transferred to hospitals with available beds.
They said hospitals are being pushed to limits no medical professional wants to face: decisions about who gets care and who doesn’t. With cases of both the delta and omicron variants surging, hospital leaders see no immediate relief in sight as they brace for the additional stress of seasonal illnesses like influenza and winter-related injuries.
The state of emergency grants Kelly the authority to suspend regulations and deploy the National Guard to assist in pandemic response efforts, including at hospitals, though the governor said Thursday a deployment isn’t anticipated. Kansas’ original state of emergency lapsed in June when Republican legislative leaders refused to meet and consider Kelly’s request for an extension.
According to New York Times data, Kansas has seen a 146% increase in COVID-19 cases in the last 14 days, a 17% increase in hospitalizations and a 15% increase in deaths. Last week, more than half of the positive cases sequenced by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment were omicron.
This is “hands-down the toughest surge the medical community has had to face since the pandemic began in 2020,” said Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer for The University of Kansas Health System.
“We are now at a record high number of hospitalizations. And that’s a problem for us because a lot of our staff have COVID-19 as well.”
Hospital officials said Wednesday that Kelly’s assistance would go a long way to helping them manage the growing crisis. The biggest problem, they say, is staffing. COVID cases are surging in communities and health care workers are not immune. Hundreds are out sick with COVID in the Kansas City area alone.
On Wednesday, for example, 740 staff members at The University of Kansas Health System were out sick out of more than 13,500.
“(An emergency declaration) allows some flexibility with what roles different staff members can play on the health care team. That’s important as well when we’re trying to get all hands on deck to try to care for people,” said Kim Megow, chief medical officer at HCA Midwest. “It can be helpful to have additional support from non-traditional staff members. Our hands are tied without an emergency declaration.”
The Kansas Hospital Association reiterated that sentiment in a statement Thursday calling the emergency order “welcome news.”
“It allows medical students, former retired health professionals and formerly trained military health professionals to immediately support hospital staffing,” KHA spokeswoman Cindy Samuelson said in an email.
The disaster declaration marks a clear change of tone for Kelly, who in early December told reporters the state was “transitioning from a sort of in-the-trenches, responsive pandemic to moving towards a steady state … much like how we deal with the flu.”
In an interview with The Star on Dec. 20 she deferred to local governments and alluded to tricky politics when asked whether she was considering a new disaster declaration.
“The way we’ve been operating in Kansas is the way we need to continue,” Kelly said. “To try to do something from the state level, we know how that would be responded to.”
But omicron has since fueled a wave of cases and accompanying hospitalizations. And Kelly said Thursday her administration chose to take action as it saw the impact.
GOP leaders expressed openness Thursday to Kelly’s initiatives but warned her not to use the state of emergency to push for mask mandates or business closures.
House Speaker Ron Ryckman said he believed the orders may provide “temporary and necessary relief and flexibility” for Kansas’ hospitals.
While Senate President Ty Masterson cast doubt on the necessity of an emergency declaration so close to the session he acknowledged the executive orders would be “helpful.”
“It is important for Kansans to understand the legislature will oppose any new mandates, shutdowns, or other restrictive measures,” Masterson said.
Attorney General Derek Schmidt, Kelly’s likely Republican challenger in 2022, called on the Legislature to exercise “strict oversight” to keep Kelly’s actions limited in the latest emergency.
“The governor’s use of emergency powers must not again be allowed to get out of hand as happened earlier in the pandemic,” Schmidt wrote on Twitter.
“Better for the legislature and governor to work together this time around. It is good the legislature reconvenes on Monday and will be in session to maintain a watchful eye.”
The new disaster declaration in Kansas comes after Missouri Gov. Mike Parson allowed his state’s emergency declaration to end last week. A Parson spokeswoman said Thursday that he would not reinstate it.
Stites expressed frustration Wednesday that public officials were “declaring victory” when the fight was far from over.
“I just love those proclamations because they’re made without any grounding to it. I think one of the problems is that people can look at a hospital, they drive by it, and it looks like it’s normal. The lights are on, it seems like things are going,” he said.
The problem affects more than just COVID patients. Anyone who finds themselves in a local emergency room right now might wait for hours.
As of Wednesday, HCA Midwest Health emergency rooms were at 100% capacity. The average wait time in AdventHealth Shawnee Mission’s ER was three hours.
Several hospitals reported they were holding patients in their emergency rooms because there are no inpatient beds available. Hospitals across Kansas are so full they can’t take transfer patients from other, often smaller rural facilities, so some patients get sent out of state.
“We know our transfers are down by about 80% because we simply don’t have beds,” said Stites.
Some hospitals are delaying surgeries because of staffing shortages.
Stites said the KU system postponed 128 this week — surgeries such as hip replacements, gastrointestinal procedures and breast reconstruction — “and had to close 20% of our ambulatory practice in order to divert people back to inpatient so we can continue to take care of the high number of COVID patients, and then everyone else,” he said.
“These are … not truly elective cases. They are cases that have to have inpatient stays, and that’s one of the few levers we have left to pull.”
The Star’s Jeanne Kuang and Jonathan Shorman contributed reporting
This story was originally published January 6, 2022 at 4:14 PM with the headline "After pleas from hospital officials, Kelly announces new COVID-19 emergency in Kansas."
