Hospitals facing supply shortages

Shortages in staff, medicines, testing supplies and equipment needed to treat the critically ill face South Florida hospitals that are now seeing a surge of coronavirus patients.

With Florida experiencing record-high increases in positive cases in recent weeks, Broward and Palm Beach County hospitals are 83% and 73% full respectively and all but a handful report their intensive care units are at or near capacity. But doctors say beds can be added and shortages are less of a concern at this time than a lack of other crucial care items needed to treat the sick in South Florida.

Severe nursing shortages and burnt-out staff have hospitals offering hazard pay and bonuses to entice workers to take on more shifts or stay longer.

In Miami-Dade County Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the state will recruit 1,000 hospital workers to help out there and another 1,500 for other counties across the state. In South Florida, Memorial Healthcare System has tapped a staffing company to bring in 100 nurses to help relieve pressure on its employees.

“Hospitals told us their biggest concern is about personnel, doctors and nurses,” Broward Mayor Dale Holness said on Tuesday. “We can manufacture supplies and PPE, but these workers are stretched tremendously. The shortage of beds is not immediate, but they are having a tough time ensuring their people are not stressed out and able to continue to provide care and support in the medical facilities.”

Exposed workers or those with the virus have depleted staff at South Florida hospitals.

“Some of the staff are still out from back in March,” said Patricia Diaz, a registered nurse and union delegate at HCA-affiliated University Hospital and Medical Center in Tamarac. “They’ve got side effects from the virus that prevent them from coming back to work.”

Diaz said COVID-19 patients require a smaller nurse-to-patient ratio, and after five months of long days, she worries those who hold those jobs will make mistakes if they become too burned out.

Almost as critical, local hospitals say they are confronting shortages of the treatments that have worked for patients sick with coronavirus — the drug remdesivir and convalescent plasma.

At Boca

Regional

Hospital, owned by Baptist Health South Florida, chief medical officer Dr. Sam Fahmy said admissions for COVID-19 have jumped 600% over the last month.

“Obviously what comes along is a much higher use of PPE (personal protective equipment), testing supplies and treatments,” he said. “At the same time, because of the demand, plasma and remdesivir are experiencing a supply chain disruption.”

Doctors know how to treat patients with the virus better than at the start of the pandemic, Fahmy said. But the medicines that help them do so are in short supply.

“We have many patients who would benefit if these treatments were more readily available,” Fahmy said. “We have to be judicious who we give them to.”

Memorial Healthcare System said its hospitals are filled with COVID-19 patients from South Broward and North Dade, forcing them to stop elective surgeries and implement their surge plan to add beds.

All hospitals test their patients to determine whether they need to be on a COVID-designated floor and prevent staff from getting exposed. But a shortage of chemical reagents used to process test results has hospitals at a disadvantage.

“We have four different platforms we run tests on. All use different reagents; all are in short supply.,” said Stanley Marks, chief medical officer for Memorial Healthcare System.

Marks said doctors now try to keep patients off ventilators for as long as possible to increase their

survival rate. But medical equipment such as highflow oxygenators, used as an alternate for ventilators, is in short supply. “Historically we have had some around, but with this disease, we need a lot more of them.”

Without more plasma, redesmivir and equipment, Marks is concerned more patients will land in the ICU and on ventilators.

Marks said patients of all ages now occupy the COVID-designated beds at Memorial hospitals. “The notion that people under 60 don’t get sick is false,” he said. “We have some very sick people in our hospitals that are in their 30s.”

In Broward County, 68% of the 202 patients in ICU beds are on ventilators.