The nursing shortage

Just gonna leave this here.

A nursing shortage and a high volume of patients prompted Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital on Sunday night to declare an “internal disaster” in the emergency room, where wait times swelled to 24 hours, Harris Health System officials said Tuesday.

Internal disasters limit the flow of ambulance traffic to the hospital and are usually triggered by infrastructure problems, such as fires or diagnostic machine failures.

On Sunday, however, the hospital could only staff 16 of its 24 ICU beds. At one point, about 130 people were in the ER waiting room from an “onslaught” of patients with a variety of health problems, said Dr. Esmaeil Porsa, president and CEO at Harris Health System. The rise in patients came as the state of Texas is dealing with an acute surge of COVID-19 hospitalizations; on Tuesday, the state reported 7,305 hospitalized patients, an increase of 38 percent over last Tuesday.

The system needs about 250 more nurses to fully staff both LBJ and Ben Taub Hospital, said Porsa.

“It got a point where it was actually unsafe for us to accept more patients because we just did not have enough staff,” he said.

Porsa said the 215-bed hospital is no longer under an internal disaster but remains at capacity. It has since added staff for two ICU beds.

The disaster designation was first brought to light by an emergency room doctor who emailed State Sen. John Whitmire Sunday night about the “untenable” situation there. The email, obtained by the Houston Chronicle, pleaded for more nurses.

Just a reminder, a lot of doctors and nurses are thoroughly burned out from the earlier COVID waves. They had every reason to believe that things were finally better and they could get back to their regular, normal jobs, but that was not to be. And now we’re asking them do it all again, for an even bigger surge with no help at all from state government in sight. It’s just going to get worse from here.

Related Posts:

This entry was posted in Elsewhere in Houston and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to The nursing shortage

  1. David Fagan says:

    41 days and counting……..

  2. Pingback: Abbott flails about on the COVID surge – Off the Kuff

Comments are closed.