Traveling nurses, ‘rationing’ ICU doctors tell the current COVID story in words and actions
As is so often the case with COVID-19, the numbers sketch out a dauntingly vast landscape while the anecdotes paint portraits of affected human denizens.
December 3 news reports from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal exemplify the effect.
The Times looks at the nomadic—and sometimes eye-opening—experience of traveling nurses who rush to virus hotspots:
- Demand for travel nurses working on contract has increased by more than 40% in the last month.
- At least 25,000 nurses work in travel nursing, though the number fluctuates, and hospitals have depended on them for decades.
- In a part of Wisconsin that has averaged more than 150 cases a day since late September, a team of four travel nurses worked at a community hospital, “grappling with the unrelenting pressure of the emergency room and a Thanksgiving holiday far from home.”
“When the pandemic began, I thought, ‘I’m going to go help, I can do some good, I can make some good money,’” one such nurse tells the Times, whose coverage includes some photos worth 1,000 words.
But on her first day in the COVID gig economy, the nurse recalls, “I was totally unprepared for the reality.”
Meanwhile WSJ homes in on physicians who feel forced to consider rationing ICU services:
- An estimated one in four ICU beds nationally is occupied by Covid-19 patients, up from one in 10 in September.
- More than 1,000 hospitals Wednesday reported a critical staffing shortage, federal data show.
- At a 33-bed hospital operating at capacity in Texas, nurses and a doctor called 60 hospitals Tuesday before finding one with an ICU opening, “sidelining one nurse from caring for patients and forcing the hospital to bring in other staff to help.”
- Two physicians from Brown University note that hospitalization rates for new COVID cases fell from 3.5% earlier in the pandemic to 2.1% in November.
“Several factors likely contributed [to the falloff], including more widespread testing and positive results among younger people and those without symptoms who won’t need hospitalization, one of the Brown doctors tells WSJ.
“But as hospitals become crowded, thresholds for admitting patients could also be consciously or unconsciously different,” reporter Melanie Evans writes.
The Brown doc says he doesn’t think “overt rationing” explains the dip in new admissions.
In any case, one nurse tells WSJ her hospital lacks staff as well as equipment for longer-term intensive care.
“We do really do what we do extremely well, but this is not what we do,” she says. “We are not set up for it.”
Click here for the Times story on traveling nurses and here for WSJ’s report on ICUs.
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.