CHI St. Vincent HS plans extra staff, supplies for eclipse
Plans for the April 8 total solar eclipse have CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs bringing in additional staff and supplies for the weekend leading up to the celestial event.
Dr. Doug Ross, CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs president, said the hospital has been working with multiple agencies and hospitals to prepare.
“The first steps have been really working with the city, the county, the ambulance agencies, the other hospitals in town,” he said. “It’s really been a great show of teamwork and how we can work and partner together to prepare. Specifically, we are looking at how do we do as much as possible before people get to town so that we’re prepared.
“So we’re bringing in extra supplies. We’re bringing in extra food. We’re bringing in extra cylinders of oxygen — all of those things that we need on a daily basis. Whereas if the local streets are gridlocked because of all the traffic and all the people, if those deliveries can’t get to us, how do we stock up and be prepared in advance?”
Ross said the hospital is “at least doubling” what it usually keeps on hand “to get us easily through another week.”
“Our nursing teams, our supply chain teams have done a really, really good job of identifying all of those things that we can get (in) deliveries on a daily basis, but if they can’t get here for four or five days, how do we ensure that we have enough levels? So we’re easily stocking up so that we could get an additional week past the eclipse day,” he said.
One of the concerns Ross and others at the hospital have is the possibility of the interruption of cellular service during the eclipse due to the anticipated influx of people overwhelming the systems.
“We’re working with our staff, our doctors that are on call that weekend, to look at alternate forms of communication,” he said. “So we’re dis
tributing pagers. …. We’ve got a good supply of pagers, where at a minimum we can basically text and communicate. We’ve got a limited number of satellite phones that we’ll distribute to some of the most urgently needed staff members, but I think a lot of it is just our plan, especially on the eclipse day itself is to have our staff here in the building.”
Ross said another major concern is getting patients and staff into the facility if traffic conditions are bad.
“Even on a normal Arkansas Derby Day, we see what the traffic is like here in Hot Springs,” he said, noting staff will stay on the hospital’s campus. “It can be really, really difficult to navigate the streets. So if we are having three, four or five times the amount of people here above a traditional Arkansas Derby Day and they’re here for four or five days, it’s going to be difficult for our ambulance crews to navigate those streets, and it’s going to be difficult for our staff to get to work.”
As the only Level II trauma center in the southern half of the state, the emergency room at CHI St. Vincent “is very, very busy,” Ross said.
“On a normal day with traditional emergencies — heart attacks, strokes, cancer patients — now you have an influx of people here from out of town who may have their own medical issues. They may be diabetics, they may have heart disease, but then you also have issues where there’s multiple more cars in town, so you’ve got potential for more motor vehicle accidents,” he said.
“So I think that’s the concern in the emergency department, is how do we handle the influx of the eclipse visitors on top of our traditional very busy emergency practice? So that’s why we’ve made the decision to staff up and do everything we can to be prepared and offload the ER.”
Ross said the primary distinction between a Level II and a Level I trauma center, such as UAMS or Arkansas Children’s Hospital, is the state’s two Level I trauma center have their staff on the premises 24 hours a day.
“Our surgeons have to be here within 30 minutes of arrival of a certain level of trauma,” he said. “So, again, we’re the only Level II trauma center in the entire southern half of Arkansas, so that is a significant expanse of people that look to us for care. The only Level I centers in the state of Arkansas are UAMS and Arkansas Children’s Hospital.
“We pretty much care for the same degree of trauma that they do. The only difference is their trauma surgeons actually have to spend the night in the hospital 24/7 whereas ours respond within 30 minutes,” Ross said.