Gov. Janet Mills’ COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health care workers, which goes into effect next week, may cost MaineHealth nearly 400 members of its statewide staff, but even losing that many workers should not lead to drastic additional cutbacks in medical care or services, according to MaineHealth CEO Andrew Mueller.

“I think, at this point, that’s not anticipated,” he said in a virtual press conference Tuesday with reporters.

Many health care workers who do not wish to get vaccinated have said they will walk off the job if the mandate goes into effect as planned. That has executives at some hospitals worried, most notably Central Maine Medical Center, which is outside of the MaineHealth network. Two weeks ago, CMMC announced that the mandate may force it to curtail services.

At the press conference, Mueller told reporters that the mandate may force the network to lose as much as 2 percent of its staff, or as many as 399 workers. Mueller did not say if the losses would be concentrated in any particular location or facility.

Mueller and other MaineHealth executives said staffing shortages are not a new problem, and that the pandemic has only exacerbated an ongoing issue.

“If we had no COVID patients, we would still have a workforce crisis,” Mueller said.

MaineHealth operates 12 hospitals throughout the state, according to its website. At Tuesday’s press conference, executives from several of the hospitals acknowledged that both staffing shortages and the pandemic are having an impact on care. 

Cindy Wade, a registered nurse and president of LincolnHealth in Damariscotta, noted that the hospital is having problems finding beds for swing patients — those who no longer have critical conditions but need enough care that they cannot simply be sent home. The hospital is used to handling three to five swing patients daily, but just this morning the hospital was treating 14 swing patients, she said, many of them taking up beds in the hospital’s emergency room.

“Our (emergency department) becomes extra busy,” she said.

Dr. Mark Fourre, president of Coastal Healthcare Alliance in Rockport, said shortages have led to cutbacks in non-urgent procedures, such as knee replacements, and Maine Medical Center reported similar cutbacks.

“We (manage cutbacks) in a very deliberate and thoughtful way,” Fourre said.

Dr. Joel Botler, an internal medicine specialist at Maine Medical Center in Portland, said prior to the pandemic when the hospital’s daily patient load reached 640, “was when the wheels would fall off.”

On Tuesday morning, Botler said, the hospital was treating 643 patients and it’s now common for the facility to treat as many as 650 on any given day. Despite the workload, Botler said, the hospital is not cutting care to those who need it most, and all the executives insisted that despite the difficulties, patients are still being treated to a high standard of care. 

“We continue to take care of the sickest patients in the state,” Botler said. “That is who we are. That is what we do.”