Georgia Hospital Worker Sounds Alarm: 'I Have Never Ever Seen Anything Like This'

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/16/891997539/georgia-hospital-worker-sounds-alarm-i-have-never-ever-seen-anything-like-this


July 16, 20204:41 PM ET
Wayne Drash


The emergency room overflowed with patients. Then, the next wave arrived. This time on stretchers.

"They were lined up along the walls in the ER," a health care worker inside a Navicent Health-owned hospital in middle Georgia told GPB News. "We never have had an influx like that. Since the Fourth of July, it has just exploded."

Staff members did what they always do. They tended to patients as best they could. For the sickest patients, staff searched for available beds in nearby hospitals. In previous weeks, the health care worker said, COVID-19 patients typically got transported to medical centers about 70 miles north to Atlanta or 160 miles east to Savannah.

This week, there was no room. Desperate, the health care worker said, administrators began checking available hospitals in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida.

The distance stretched more than 850 miles north to south, from Louisville, Ky., down to Orlando, Fla.

"When you have to start shipping patients out of state, it's bad," the worker said. "When the hospitals are full, that's when it becomes really dangerous for everybody."

The Navicent employee approached GPB News late Wednesday, saying hospital systems are not providing an accurate reflection of what staffers are seeing inside the walls of medical centers overrun with patients. The employee spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of getting fired, and NPR is not identifying the Navicent hospital where the employee works to maintain that person's anonymity.

"People will never understand if we do not tell the truth about how bad it really is," the employee said. "That's what makes us so angry."

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The recent surge has strained hospitals, and many are running out of intensive care beds, said state Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, the Republican lawmaker whose full-time job is as a doctor in Rome.

In a video session about health policy on Wednesday, he said his hospital this week took in a patient from 150 miles away in Macon. "We were the closest ICU bed open," Hufstetler said. "Macon is a long way from Rome, so there's a lot of ICUs filled up right now."

That trend, he said, is not a good one.

"Some people don't want to take it very seriously, and that's been real disappointing to me," Hufstetler said. "I'm fighting it every day here."

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The front-line worker wishes more hospital staff would speak up – that the public health emergency demands it of them.

"You're looking at compassion burnout among employees who are struggling to try to keep these patients alive," the employee said. "It's exhausting."