KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The need for hospital beds in Kansas City is increasing, as doctors predicted.
Hospitals in Kansas City are receiving more COVID-19 patients from outside the metro area on top of the surge in cases locally.
Patients from out of town are the sickest of the sick.
"There are not enough resources to take care of critically ill patients in these small critical access hospitals, and that does require transfer to a higher level of care, including our St. Luke's entities," Dr. Andrew Schlachter said.
Schlachter is a pulmonologist with St. Luke's Hospital.
Olathe Medical Center has always cared for patients from more rural areas because of its location, but Dr. Kathleen Blake said her hospital is seeing an uptick in cases everywhere.
"We recently have had some patients from further out of town, but it's more a bed space and staffing issue," Black said. "It's not rural health care access, it's just everyone is stressed right now."
Doctors said the need for intensive care unit and inpatient beds is surging.
"In Hays though, they do have 30 patients: 27 active and three in that recovery period so it is taking up a large portion of their hospital beds," Dr. Dana Hawkinson with University of Kansas Health System said Tuesday morning.
Nurses at KU are turning other parts of the hospital into ICU wards to make space.
"All of us are being affected so much by COVID that we are having to do all sorts of things, open up alternative care areas, take some of our post-anesthesia recovery areas and turn them into hospital beds. We just don't have enough beds," Dr. Steven Stites said.
Pascaline Muhindura, a registered nurse at Research Medical Center, said she's noticed the demographics on her floor are changing. Usually she sees trauma patients from the inner city.
Muhindura works on the cardiac/pulmonary unit, which serves as an ICU stepdown unit.
"In smaller towns in Missouri, we're seeing those patients as well, which typically is not the kind of patients we see at Research," Muhindura said.
Muhindura said she wants people to know that nurses are now caring for more than two patients at a time, which she says is dangerous and not a situation nurses feel comfortable with.
The trauma patients who'd normally be on her floor are now being moved to a regular hospital floor, where the nurses are not trained to handle trauma patients.
"You definitely have to wonder if the governor of Missouri would have mandated a mask mandate, if that would have changed the amount of cases we're seeing right now," Muhindura said.
Schlachter said now is not the time to be lax with following COVID-19 safety guidelines.
"Even as a vaccine is on the horizon and we can consider ourselves in the final lap of this pandemic, now is not the time to lower our guard," Schlachter said. "We need to wear masks, we need to social distance, we need to wash our hands, we need to stay home if we are sick."
—
