U.S. to soon hit worst COVID-19 staffing shortage to date: GWHWI
Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman, Brian Sozzi, and Myles Udland discuss COVID-19 and hospital staffing outlook with Patricia Pittman, George Washington University Professor of Health Policy.
Video Transcript
REPORTER: One of the surprising and unfortunate phrases that we all became familiar with in 2020 was, flatten the curve, the idea that we needed to slow the rate of COVID infections, really, to keep pressure off of the health care system. But as we have seen cases rise throughout the fall, a number of states remain in acute distress as it relates to staffing issues at facilities across the health care system. Joining us now to talk more about this issue is Patricia Pittman. She is a Professor of Health Policy at George Washington University.
And Patricia, we talked about a month ago about the concerns that you had, and the tracking that your group was doing as it related to staff shortages in states IN areas of the health care system. And I guess I'd ask, has the situation deteriorated in line with expectations faster than you expected, or have things been OK in the last month as we've continued to see this relentless spread of COVID through the country.
PATRICIA PITTMAN: Well, I would say in general, things have proceeded exactly as expected. We were predicting this. And it has in fact, come to play. We are seeing tremendous strain and shortages across the country. Our data show that fully 48 states will be facing shortages of at least one of the specialties that are essential to caring for COVID patients. So Hawaii and Vermont are the only two states really that are not facing this problem.
So it's a distressing situation, and we're expecting that it's going to get worse before it gets better, as everyone has said. By about mid January, we'll probably see the peak in terms of the staffing shortages.
- So if you could, sort of connect the dots for us, Patricia. And I think we talked about this a little bit last time, but effectively, what happens when there are not enough staff at a hospital that is crowded with COVID patients. There might be enough beds, but what is the care like then? And also how are the staffers doing in these kinds of situations?
PATRICIA PITTMAN: Right. So you know, it's different for different professions within the intensive care units. So for example, we see the greatest shortages for intensive care doctors, but you can actually address some of those shortages through telehealth. In other words, you could have an intensivist offsite who's providing supervision for example, to doctors that are not specialists in intensive care, for example, hospitalists.
But the real crunch comes with the nurses, because you have to be at the bedside to do nursing care for the most part, at least for the COVID patients. And so even though from a data perspective, we're seeing fewer shortages for nurses than for the doctors, it's actually a worse problem. Because when it hits, there's really no alternative.
So what are hospitals doing? For the most part, they have a strained plan, and they have a surge plan. The strain plans essentially ask the health care workers to care for more patients per professional, with the associated effects that has both in terms of the exhaustion that the health care workers are facing, and the safety of the care itself.
The surge plans, which come next, tend to move staff from one part of the hospital to the intensive care unit. So for example, they may call on staff that are in the operating rooms in different units, and provide quick training and supervision for them to move into the ICUs, to the intensive care units.
And again, there are a series of problems associated with that. Many nurses, in particular, are concerned about whether they can provide quality care, and may not want to be doing that. They may not come to work. Nurses are also concerned about their own health, particularly older nurses, so they may be restraining from work. And then younger nurses often have kids at home. And we know that many schools are functioning remotely. And so many of those young mothers are having to stay home for that reason.
And so it's not a slam dunk that you can just move particularly nurses from ORs to the ICU. There are a lot of challenges with that. And so it's not it's not ideal. It also means from a financial perspective for the hospitals, that they have to diminish the number of elective procedures that they're doing in those operating rooms. And that has detrimental effects on the hospital from a financial perspective as well.
- Patricia, are there any indications that these shortages you're talking about are starting to round the corner. Any signs of incremental improvement week to week?
PATRICIA PITTMAN: So there's still a lot of unknowns. There's the issue of the variant, the COVID variant. We don't know what that will mean in terms of hospitalizations going forward. We're hoping that it won't mean more hospitalizations. But that's definitely something that we don't know.
The other thing is the vaccination rollout. Hopefully, most health care workers will have been vaccinated. That could create more confidence in the health care system both for health care workers and for patients. Hopefully, there will be less absenteeism on the part of health care workers once they're vaccinated. And rolling out the vaccine, obviously, will affect the demand side of how many patients need to be hospitalized.
But there's no question that the next two weeks are going to be the roughest period. And then the open questions are what are going to happen sort of 30 days out, whether we're going to turn the corner or not. We just don't know yet I don't think.
- All right, Patricia Pittman, Professor of Health Policy at George Washington University. Thanks so much for joining the show. I know we'll talk soon. Really appreciate the work you and your team are doing on this issue. Thanks for having me.
