Tina Freese Decker, CEO of Grand Rapids-based Spectrum Health, joined Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, the state’s chief medical executive, urged Michigan residents Friday to stay masked up and follow social distancing protocols.
The state was investigating 991 outbreaks and “broad community spread,” Khaldun said. It has been a week of horrid numbers, with Michigan leading the nation in new infections, hospitalizations and the percentage of people testing positive for COVID.
“What's concerning,” Spectrum Chief Operating Officer Brian Brasser said in an interview, is “that our trajectory looks very, very similar to what it did in the first part of October.”
Which is why Spectrum was among those canceling some procedures.
“Any time we make a decision to defer procedures like this, it comes not lightly because we recognize that the risk that is associated with deferred care,” Brasser told the Free Press. “But we also need to make sure that we're providing good, safe and effective care and we recognize that with the spike of COVID inpatient activity and just a general high census overall, it was important for us to do that.”
Other health systems made the same choice including Michigan Medicine, Henry Ford Health System’s Macomb County hospital in Clinton Township, and Mercy Health Muskegon Medical Center.
If case rates continue to climb, leaders at Beaumont Health, McLaren Health Care, Ascension Michigan and Sparrow said they will consider similar measures.
Meanwhile, public health officials, including those charged with contact tracing and other health efforts, are struggling to keep up, too.
“Our public health system is overwhelmed, we cannot keep up the pace, with all of our new cases that are coming in every day,” Khaldun said.
On the inside
It is a dreaded deja vu, with a few notable differences, several health care workers told Bridge Michigan and the Detroit Free Press in recent days.
Gone is the fear of the unknown when the coronavirus first hit last spring and the frantic scramble for personal protective equipment.
But gone, too, are the stream of community-provided meals and well wishes that buoyed frontline workers in those early days.
And the camaraderie forged in the early chaotic days has started to crack in places, not necessarily in front of patients, but behind the scenes.
“There’s bickering amongst each other because they’re stressed out,” said Josephine Walker, a nurse at Ascension Providence Rochester Hospital, and a vice president of the nurses union, OPEIU Local 40.
It’s a familiar, bone-deep weariness as staff moves from patient to patient, said Jeff Morawski, a long-time nurse and president of the OPEIU Local 40, which represents nurses at McLaren Macomb Hospital in Mount Clemens as well as the Ascension site.
“There are cases, there are surgeries, there are procedures. The ERs are filled,” said “We are busting at the seams.”
And that inevitably means it’s patients who wait. And wait.
Colleen Rowland said she waited for seven hours Tuesday in a packed emergency room at Beaumont Hospital, Taylor — in pain from kidney stones and a raging urinary tract infection.
“It just didn’t seem like I was in the U.S. anymore,” said Rowland, 25, a respite care worker.
She said she arrived mid-morning at the emergency room after pulling to the side of the road in sudden pain and vomiting en route to her job. She was told at an urgent care facility she needed hospital care.
“You get used to being privileged, to not being in pain,” Rowland said. But “everybody in that room was miserable. There were people just keeled over in their seats over puke buckets.”
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April 10, 2021 at 06:12AM
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Workers weary, patients angry, as COVID fills Michigan hospitals — again - Bridge Michigan
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