COVID-19 is causing major damage to Kansas hospitals with a stressful COVID-19 surge. This is unfortunate as the new strain is putting a real strain on the community. Resources are under a strict limit and hospitalizations are rising. Nurses are already struggling to sustain their workloads, and the latest surge, which began last month, may push them over the edge.
1/3 of the patients are incapable of going anywhere but to the University of Kansas Health’s Great Bend Campus. This one of the only hospitals in the area with the infrastructure to handle these patients. A nurse recently said that “working in the emergency room the past several weeks, we’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of patients that we see daily.”
The Latest COVID-19 Outbreak Is Especially Hard on Small Hospitals
The most recent outbreak is landing patients with symptoms of fatigue, fever, nausea, and shortness of breath in a small hospital of about thirty-three beds and five beds in the emergency rooms. Being that the hospital isn’t entirely capable of using an intensive care unit, healthcare workers can’t transfer serious cases. This means that they have to deal with serious cases in the same areas as other patients with unrelated conditions.
As some nurses will explain, they “have an area blocked off for our nurses to care for COVID positive patients. That pulls from the rest of the unit when you’re dedicating one or two staff members to provide direct care for those patients.”
Nurses do their best to recognize faces earlier so that if there are denials, other beds are seen in other hospitals. Arranging transport has also been challenging. Hospitals outside of Kansas have seen COVID-19 numbers rise higher and higher. As many as 600 COVID-19 patients have had to be quarantine in the state as recently as Tuesday.
As dramatic as things may turn out to be in these instances, you can rest assured that the very hospitalization of any patients is because of COVID-19. In July, the Hays hospital has had only one day with absolutely no COVID-19 patients.
