St. Joseph hospital reschedules surgeries, procedures over ‘critical patient capacity’
Saying that St. Joseph hospital is at “critical patient capacity,” PeaceHealth is holding off on most surgical and procedural interventions at least through Wednesday, May 12.
“Our capacity constraints are not primarily due to COVID-19,” Dr. Sudhakar Karlapudi, chief medical officer for PeaceHealth Northwest, said in an email to staff on Tuesday morning, May 11, that was posted on reddit.
The hospital is expecting to return to a regular schedule on Thursday, May 13, hospital spokesperson Bev Mayhew told The Bellingham Herald in an email Wednesday.
Karlapudi said that the Bellingham hospital has seen a “significant increase” in postpartum and pediatric patients as well as people coming to the emergency department (emergency room).
“Complicating our situation is that virtually all hospitals up and down the I-5 corridor are experiencing similar capacity constraints and therefore are not accepting transfers,” Karlapudi said.
St. Joseph was calling area hospitals every four hours to ask if they could accept transfers and, so far, all were reporting similar constraints, he further explained to The Bellingham Herald on Tuesday.
Karlapudi said there didn’t seem to be any “commonality” among the patients behind the increase in hospitalizations, other than the moms going into labor.
In response, the hospital is rescheduling surgeries and procedures, including Cath Lab procedures, that aren’t critical for at least 48 hours. Affected doctors and patients have been notified.
“We will evaluate capacity on an hour-by-hour basis going forward,” Karlapudi said.
In the email posted on reddit, Karlapudi said the hospital had activated the incident command structure, citing patient and caregiver safety.
“The busier a hospital gets, the more space, supplies and staffing are required to care for them safely. We are always busy here, but we have experienced unprecedented patient volume in our ED over a period of days that has impacted the rest of the hospital operations,” he said to The Bellingham Herald.
“To ensure that we can care for these patients safely, we made the decision to reschedule all but urgent or emergent surgeries and procedures for the next two days so that we could focus the necessary resources on this influx of patients,” he said. “We are meeting every two hours and working closely with our medical staff to evaluate patient needs, making adjustments as necessary to safely care for those who need it.”
He acknowledged that having procedures rescheduled could be tough for those affected.
“We know that it is a tremendous inconvenience for patients and their families to have a procedure postponed for a few days or a week, and we sincerely apologize. However, our decisions are driven exclusively by safety,” Karlapudi said.
As for COVID-related hospitalizations at St. Joseph hospital, that remains high although the hospital has seen the number of those patients dip in the past week.
On Wednesday, May 12, the hospital reported that it was treating 22 COVID-related patients, which was up three form the 19 reported Tuesday but down from the 28 reported May 4. The pandemic high for COVID-related hospitalizations at the hospital was 31 on Jan. 29.
“We currently have capacity to care for additional COVID patients should any of our community members develop COVID and need us,” Karlapudi said in the briefing. “So we have that ability.”
—David Rasbach (drasbach@bhamherald.com) contributed to this story.
This story was originally published May 11, 2021 at 2:39 PM.
