HJBR Sep/Oct 2021

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE  I  SEP / OCT 2021 17 You ended with “a challenging few weeks.” Do you think it will subside after a few weeks? Well, I don’t think it will subside, but I would expect and hope that we at least hit the peak and begin coming down the other side of it. I’ll tell you, if we don’t hit the peak very, very soon, within a week or even two, and that will be pushing it, we are going to be in a catastrophic situation where our hospitals are overwhelmed. At the moment, our hospitals are stretched thinner than they ever have been during this pandemic, and there’s not much more that they can stretch. So, if we don’t hit the peak very, very soon, we are going to be in a place that we have not been yet. I would expect that within a few weeks, we will be coming down the other side, but it’s going to take more time than that until we get down to a level where transmission is low and risk is low. There’s going to be a lot of time, even as we are descending, where there’s still going to be high rates of trans- mission and a lot of risk out there. Are our hospitals equipped with the nec- essary PPE at this point? They are. They typically have enough PPE. They also typically have enough ven- tilators, right now. And that’s markedly dif- ferent from the first surge in the back of March and April of 2020. The real limiting factor back then, in what we were worried we would have to triage, was those type of supplies — PPE and some ventilators. Then PPE was triaged. The hospital workers were having to reuse PPE long after the recom- mended disposal days, and that was terrible, but we never had to really formally triage ventilators. Thankfully, that’s not the con- cern now. We do have enough PPE. There’s more stored, there’re locations across the country if we need it. We do think they have enough ventilators. The challenge now is hospital staffing, particularly nursing staffing. We are experi- encing a nursing shortage. It’s a nationwide nursing shortage that we feel here in Louisi- ana, as well. And the fact is, that even before this surge of Delta, hospitals in Louisiana, really hospitals across the country, have found it difficult to retain their nurses and difficult to recruit new nurses. I understand why. This has been an incredibly challeng- ing year — particularly for nurses who are the front lines above all else — an incred- ibly challenging year, and many nurses that I know personally have taken the opportunity to either pursue nonclinical work, go back to school, take a break or maybe take a travel- ing gig that pays more. And I get that, because they’ve had such challenging years, but unfortunately it does leave hospitals a little bit shorthanded. That is the challenge now. We are putting out rather unprecedented requests to our federal partners for assistance. There is the federal Disaster Medical Assistance Team that’s on the ground now in Baton Rouge helping to augment medical staff. We have more that are en route, but they’re not going to be sufficient because there are staffing shortages existing elsewhere in the country, too. It will help, but it won’t solve all of our problems. The only way that we avoid com- pletely overwhelming our hospitals is if we, as a community, are effective at mitigating this surge. That’s why that the governor’s masking order that was issued a couple of days ago is unfortunately needed and so very important right now. The Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady of the Lake System, headquartered in Baton Rouge, announced that the organization “will require the COVID-19 vaccine for all team members, employed providers, residents, students in clinical rotations, contract staff, and volunteers.” One anti-vax nurse we spoke with reacted to that this way, “Boy, they think they’re short staffed now, just wait.” Ochsner Health Systems stated last week that they would not be requiring vaccinations at this point but offering PPE for unvacci- nated employees. The hospitals we spoke to in Louisiana said their staff is currently between 50% and 64% vaccinated. One would assume that these folks, more than most, know the risks but have chosen not to be vaccinated. Do you think this is go- ing to cause a mass exodus from systems that are requiring the vaccine and shake an already stressed healthcare system? No, I don’t, because I think more and more hospital systems are going to be “It is not an exaggeration or an aberration of the data by any stretch to say right now that this is the worst point of the pandemic than any point prior in the state of Louisiana, by nearly any measure that you’d look at it.”