TORRANCE, Calif. — As the COVID pandemic fills intensive care units across Los Angeles County, a panel of South Bay-based healthcare workers agreed that hospitals are facing their own challenge: staffing enough workers to take care of critically ill patients.
Last Thursday night, staff and leaders from three South Bay hospitals — Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center, and Torrance Memorial Hospital, in Torrance; and Kaiser Permanente South Bay Medical Center in Harbor City — joined California Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi for a panel discussion about what frontline healthcare workers are facing.
“There’s not enough staff with the skills to take care of patients,” said Rose Sanchez, a Nurse Manager at Kaiser Permanente South Bay.
Before the pandemic, her unit treated surgical patients. Now it’s a telemetry floor, doing cardiac monitoring as well as COVID treatment.
“Our nurses have had to change focus and learn how to take care of these patients. It turned overnight for us,” she said.
The ICUs are overflowing — as of Thursday’s panel, there were 25 ICU patients at Kaiser South Bay; typically, the capacity there is 12 beds.
Dr. Alex Hakim, a critical care doctor at Providence Little Company of Mary, is preparing for even darker times ahead, owing to the Christmas and New Year holidays.
“I think all of the warnings are out there that something very bad, and potentially catastrophic, could hit every ICU,” Hakim said.
His hospital is at about 11 patients over its intended ICU capacity, and that’s before any surges related to Christmas and New Years' gatherings may hit.
“I don’t want to know what that looks like. I don’t want to know. But I don’t know if we have a choice about that,” he said.
South Bay hospitals are seeing an increase in COVID admissions among younger populations, including people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.
“It’s impacting our youth in ways that we never thought we would have to see in this way,” Sanchez said. “We don’t know if this is pandemic fatigue, if they want to dismiss this as another flu. This is not another flu. I’ve been through harsh flu seasons — we’ve seen Ebola, we’ve seen MERS, the first SARS. This is nothing like that. This is serious.”
As Muratsuchi said to his panelists, there seems to be a “ray of hope across the country” in the form of the nascent vaccine rollout.
Torrance Memorial Hospital CEO Craig Leach said that his hospital would quickly ramp up distribution of about 2,400 doses among TMH's frontline staff and physicians. The next round of doses, he expects, should cover the rest of the hospital's 6,000 employees. "There's light at the end of the tunnel, but our fingers are crossed."
Hakim's excitement was tempered with the idea that the vaccine has to hit a critical mass of the public to make a difference. Sanchez agreed, saying that people still have to make sure that they're doing the right things, including socially distancing, to protect those unable to receive the vaccine for various reasons.
There was concern among the public in Muratsuchi's live stream that certain supplies, like ventilators, may not exist in great enough numbers to keep up with the next surge.
"We have adequate supplies of ventilators," Sanchez said. "The issue would be, who is going to run the ventilators?"