Each time a new shift begins at St. Luke’s Magic Valley Medical Center, there are as many as 15 fewer nurses working than normal. Right now, it’s typical that they’re more than four nurses short.
“It’s not sustainable,” said Dr. Joshua Kern, the vice president of medical affairs at St. Luke’s Magic Valley, during a press conference on Thursday.
In the past few weeks, the Twin Falls hospital has cared for more COVID-19 patients than at any other point in the pandemic. It set a new record for COVID-19 patients in the hospital on Thursday, with more than 50 admitted, according to Kern.
And while bed space is a concern -- the hospital’s 36-bed COVID-19 unit is full and so is the ICU -- the driver of that crunch is staff numbers. The hospital needs enough healthy staff to care for the patients -- those with COVID-19 and without. But staffing levels have been low due to quarantines and illness to the point where St. Luke’s has had to cancel elective procedures in Twin Falls that require overnight hospital stays through at least next week, in order to free up more people to treat COVID-19 patients. Kern said Thursday the hospital will likely need to make more adjustments to the services it’s able to offer in the next few days.
In the meantime, nurses are working overtime, staff from Boise are now in Twin Falls and the hospital is trying to hire 12 additional traveling nurses.
“It is significant in the sense that we are being taxed beyond our own employees in terms of our capacity for care,” said Brie Sandow, who oversees staffing for St. Luke’s Health System. “But, we still are able, at this point, to respond with these external nurses and provide the majority of the care at St. Luke's with our internal employees.”
In addition to caring for coronavirus patients, staff are trying to communicate the gravity of the situation to the greater community.
Sheri Tolley is an infection prevention specialist at St. Luke’s Magic Valley. She gets the lab results for all the patients in the hospital, so she knows how many COVID-19 patients are there. She also keeps track of the number of sick employees.
“I saw the numbers going up and up and up,” she said.
Last week, she took to Facebook when things in the hospital were getting bad.
“This is a plea from your healthcare community,” she wrote in a public post. “Even if you think that this disease is not going to be a big deal for you. It is a devastating disease for someone else. If you are not following social distancing guidelines start today.”
People thanked her for giving an update. The post was shared more than one hundred times. But there were other comments suggesting some people didn’t buy it. They said she was crying wolf.
“That actually really surprised me -- that people wouldn't believe,” she said.
It’s disheartening to hospital staff to see people not wearing masks or physically distancing outside the hospital walls when they and their colleagues are working extra long hours to care for people in the community, Tolley said
Nurse Emily Jones, who treats COVID-19 patients in the cardiopulmonary unit, says after seeing patients with the virus from the Wood River Valley’s peak in late March through the current spike now, she still feels the need to tell people in the Twin Falls community to take the virus seriously.
“I'm just here to tell you that it is real,” she said. “Families are struggling and patients are struggling. The staff is struggling with what we see on a daily basis.”
Find reporter Rachel Cohen on Twitter @racheld_cohen
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