Dr. Marjorie Bessel

Chief clinical officer

Banner Health in Phoenix

ON STAFFING:

We are well over 1,400 (positive or suspected COVID-19) patients per day at Banner, and what we found is the COVID patients are very labor-intensive … One COVID patient doesn’t equal the labor intensity of what one patient preCOVID was like. It’s an additional burden that is also putting stress on our staff.

ON SUPPLIES:

Our most difficult issue right now is isolation gowns. We are going through about a million isolation gowns a month at this time, so we are being creative in that space. (We are going back to the previous decades) when we used to have cloth gowns and you would launder them.

ON PREPARING FOR THE SURGE:

We had the luxury of time to put plans into place and those plans are having to be pulled off the shelves and implemented … (The downside) is the community, and society in general, feeling like it wasn’t going to come to us, that we could be complacent about CDC guidelines. There is some fatigue around it.

ON TRIAGE AS A LAST RESORT:

There is a lot of misunderstanding that we have got people not getting ventilators that need them, and that is not the case. We absolutely have plans in place to do triage if it were to get to a point like that … (but) we are committed to doing everything we can not to get to that. (Arizona) systems are working collectively … so no one would get to such a dire situation. We are committed to sharing the load, and if we have to do a triage situation all of us in the state would do it at the same time.