Take it from a Tri-City ER doctor, hospitals are at capacity thanks to COVID | Guest Opinion

Editor’s Note: A Tri-City emergency room doctor who wishes to remain anonymous sent the Tri-City Herald this perspective on the COVID pandemic. We thought it was so powerful we agreed to break from policy and keep the source unnamed so that we could share it. Before publishing, we confirmed the doctor’s identity.

As an ER physician in the Tri-Cities, I would like to hopefully put out there a different perspective of the COVID pandemic.

I’m sure no one wants to read about this anymore. People are sick of talking about it, and many people believe it’s not real.

We hear on the news all the time that hospitals are full and that is true. Every hospital in the Tri-Cities is at maximum capacity. Every hospital in the Tri-Cities is boarding patients in the ER.

And while it’s not just for COVID, it is COVID that is showing the flaws in our healthcare system.

Hospitals in the United States are businesses that have to operate at maximum efficiency in order to stay open. Despite what the public may think, hospitals have a difficult time keeping their doors open across the nation.

With this pandemic there has been an increase in the number of patients that need to be admitted and observed and cared for. So when you take a business that has to run at maximum efficiency and then you add even 5% on top of that threshold, you overwhelm the system.

As a result, every hospital in the Tri-Cities is full. I can’t personally speak for every hospital in the state of Washington, but I can personally verify that I have been unable to transfer any critically ill patients out of my ER to an available ICU bed in Washington state in my past four shifts.

This issue is getting worse, not better.

I have sent patients to Oregon and I have sent patients to Idaho just to have access to an ICU bed.

The secondary issue with COVID that no one seems to understand is the challenge of discharging an elderly patient from the hospital.

Nursing homes are under strict guidelines as to when they can accept a patient, or if they are even willing to. As a result, there are multiple patients in the hospitals in the Tri-Cities who have improved enough to be discharged but wait for days — even weeks — until a place can be found where a patient can be sent.

This greatly hampers the ability to admit other patients.

This means that during every shift the beds I am able to use in the ER to care for acutely ill people coming in by ambulance or through the door is limited because I’m holding patients in the ER who are waiting for a bed somewhere else.

The ER is a transition station. Once admitted to the hospital, patients are supposed to move from the ER to another space.

Another social aspect is that elderly patients will come to the ER because the family is unable to care for their needs at home — specifically patients with dementia or confusion that seems to be progressing over the past few months. These specific elderly patients I’m talking about meet no medical criteria to be admitted to the hospital, but in multiple circumstances hospitals in the Tri-Cities have had to care for these patients because families are unable to take care of them at home.

So what can a community do?

We can help take care of ourselves and our neighbors. We can step up and look for ways to help support those people who just need a little extra help.

Wearing a mask and washing your hands often helps. For those of you who are against masks, I know many of you would wear a mask if you thought it would help provide hospital space when your mother got sick, or your grandfather had to be admitted.

Isn’t it worth that little sacrifice? And don’t limit your views to family.

The Tri-Cities is a great community that steps up to help people in need. Fundraisers are always successful and people rally to help families going through a crisis.

I don’t understand why all of us won’t rally to help the community and the nation in crisis by doing simple things like wearing a mask and washing our hands.

This is no conspiracy. It’s real.

Even though I believe that 99% of the population will not have an issue with COVID and require admission to the hospital, our health care system is not equipped to take care of that extra one percent who normally wouldn’t come to the hospital to be treated.

We all need to do what we can to help our community.

This story was originally published December 11, 2020 at 11:26 AM.