Medical staff turn a patient onto their side inside Elkhart General Hospital’s COVID-19 unit earlier this year. Hospitals are reporting recent local and national staffing shortages. Staff file photo by Robert Franklin
As South Bend area COVID-19 hospitalizations have risen sharply over the past month, hospital officials are increasingly worrying about having enough people to care for everyone.
Hospitals are suffering the same labor shortage as other employers, but it’s being exacerbated by the fatigue, trauma and stress that health care workers have experienced over the pandemic’s first year and a half, at a time when the delta variant is driving a a new surge in severe cases, overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated.
“The people that have been doing this for 18 months have been working overtime and they’re tired, and we can’t squeeze any more hours out of people,” said Dr. Dale Patterson, Memorial Hospital’s vice president for medical affairs. “Honestly people have left health care and gone on to do other things because they didn’t want to do this anymore.”
As of Wednesday, Memorial was treating 30 COVID-19 patients, up seven from two weeks prior. Over that time, COVID-19 hospitalizations in the seven-county district that includes St. Joseph, Elkhart and Marshall counties jumped 70%, from 81 to 137. Statewide on Thursday, there were 2,366 hospitalized with COVID-19, the most since Jan. 20.
Reacting to the strain on health care systems, Gov. Eric Holcomb issued an executive order Wednesday requiring hospitals to report weekly to the state when they lack the staff to accept patients brought in by ambulance, known as “diversion,” a practice that Memorial and Saint Joseph Health Systems’ Mishawaka hospital have been implementing as needed in recent weeks.
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