Saturday, November 21, 2020

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XCIX): Urban and rural places compete for hospital beds

That's the gist of this NPR story today out of Kansas City, Missouri, reported by Alex Smith.  Here's the salient excerpt:    

Dr. Marc Larsen leads COVID-19 treatment at Saint Luke's Health System in Kansas City, where a recent count showed a quarter of the hospitalized COVID-19 patients came from outside of the metro.

MARC LARSEN: Not only are we seeing an uptick in the patients in our hospital from the rural community, they're sicker when they - when we get them because they're able to handle, you know, the less-sick patients.

SMITH: Larsen says that two-thirds of patients coming from rural areas need intensive care and stay in the hospital for an average of two weeks.

LARSEN: And we get the sickest of the sick.

SMITH: Dr. Rex Archer is the head of Kansas City's Health Department. He warns that the city's 33 hospitals are put at risk by the influx of rural patients.

REX ARCHER: We've had this huge swing that's occurred because they're not wearing masks. And, yes, that's putting pressure on our hospitals, which is, you know, unfair to our residents that might be denied an ICU bed.

Here's another story by Smith for the Kansas City NPR affiliate, this one from three weeks ago.   

3 comments:

Jaspreet Lochab said...

I think Smith's story is a testament to how much we, as a country, need to invest in our healthcare system in rural areas. I came across a statistic that noted upwards of 60% of hospitals in the rural south had less than 50 hospital beds. It's surprising to know that hospitals with such small capacities exist. Especially when, in places where the population is spread out far and wide, there are also fewer hospitals. Given that that's the case, it would make more sense for me to ensure that hospitals catering to multiple rural communities have enough space to take care of the populations they're serving. I think the other matter worth shining some light on is that, as Smith notes, patients that are the sickest have to be transferred to urban areas to get care because the hospitals in rural areas don't have the necessary means to support these individuals. This is especially scary because what if something were to go wrong during a transfer? Which wouldn't be all too unpredictable given that these individuals are the sickest of the sick. This is just another reason why we need to put more effort and investments into ensuring hospitals in rural areas are able to deal with unprecedented pandemics such as this.

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