Wall Street Journal Report Focuses on Rural Hospitals’ COVID-Triggered Crisis
The Wall Street Journal on Nov. 27 published an extensive portrait of the U.S. rural healthcare system in crisis. In the article, entitled “Covid-19 Pushes Rural Hospitals to Their Limits,” Melanie Evans described a situation in which rural hospitals across the country have reached a sustained crisis point.
Evans opened her report by describing a situation in which the physician-CEO pleaded with the leaders of a nearby large hospital to take one of her patients, who needed a specialized procedure that her hospital could not do for the patient, and agreed to take that critically ill patient back to her hospital, something that until the coronavirus pandemic would have been an unthinkable offer—but which was necessitated by the fact that the larger hospitals are running out of bed space for critically ill patients because of the pandemic.
“The trade-off is one of many that doctors and nurses at the nation’s smallest hospitals are now making to help patients, as the pandemic’s largest, most widespread U.S. surge pushes rural health care to its limits. Hospitalizations nationally have nearly doubled in November, setting a record Nov. 10, and every day since, to reach about 90,480 people in hospitals with Covid-19 on Thursday, Covid Tracking Project data show. The number of people in intensive-care units due to Covid-19 rose on Thursday to an all-time high of 17,802.”
What’s more, Evans wrote, “Early in the pandemic, hospitals and doctors had no available treatments, but have gained new therapies and more understanding of Covid-19 since then, which they say has helped to shorten hospital stays and improve survival. Still, the latest surge threatens to undo those advances as hospitals become overtaxed, doctors and health-care disaster-preparedness experts warn. The prolonged surge has taken root in rural communities, straining small hospitals that are often vital waystations for patients who need to be transferred to larger hospitals with more specialists and equipment. Now, many larger hospitals are full,” she noted.
“Hospitals are busier now than during the nation’s first surge in the spring, when they postponed large numbers of surgeries to free up nurses and preserve critical equipment for coronavirus cases,” Evans continued. “Sharp financial losses and backlogs of anxious patients followed, and many medical facilities are now attempting to continue more routine care even as Covid-19 cases climb. Big hospitals are in some cases making room by sending patients to rural hospitals, where staff are keeping patients they normally wouldn’t, either because they can’t find an open bed elsewhere or because they are seeking to ease pressure on larger hospitals, said doctors, nurses and executives of hospitals in the Midwest and South.”
What’s more, Evans wrote, “Large hospitals in North Dakota, Montana and Texas report that they must regularly deny smaller hospitals’ transfer requests. Altru Health System in Grand Forks, N.D., has seen the number of transfers it must deny increase fivefold this year compared with the prior year, said a spokeswoman.” And she quoted Katie Gallagher, a spokeswoman for St. Peter’s Health Regional Medical Center in Helena, Montana, as stating that “Our ability to accept transfers changes hour by hour.”
The entire article can be read here.
