The Tribune

By KHRISNA RUSSELL

Tribune Chief Reporter

krussell@tribunemedia.net

DOCTORS Hospital is “overrun” with COVID-19 patients and continues to be pounded from the requirements of care required for people with the virus, according to its chief executive officer, Dr Charles Diggiss.

“It’s been very serious (and) very severe consistently over the last 10 days,” he told The Tribune yesterday.

The influx of cases has meant that the private hospital has had to get creative with where it houses virus patients. Negative pressure rooms, also called isolation rooms, are a type of hospital room that keeps patients with infectious illnesses, or patients who are susceptible to infections from others, away from other patients, visitors, and healthcare staff.

He said: “Doctors Hospital with COVID took on a very specific mission to negatively pressurize as many spaces as we could and what we found as we moved from surge to surge is that the virus and the severity of the disease continues to be ahead of us.

“What we did not anticipate is that our capacity would be overwhelmed so what that means is that the entire hospital would need to be a negatively pressurized space for us to meet the challenges and requirements of COVID.

“Sometimes we end up having to put patients in areas and barrier off those areas even though where the patients themselves may locate may not itself be a negatively pressurized area but we continue to take every opportunity to negatively pressurize our patient care spaces.”

Asked if the hospital was out of space, he said: “Doctors Hospital being out of space is a message that is trying to appeal to the public to understand that we have been overrun with the treatment of COVID patients.

“…We continue to be overrun with the treatment of COVID patients, but we find space when we have to find space.”

Dr Diggiss said it has also come down to deciding who will get ventilators and, on some occasions, there are none available.

However, he noted that the hospital will not remove patients from ventilators to accommodate others who may also need the breathing machine.

“I think it’s really important for the public to appreciate that of the almost 20 lets say 19 ventilators available that 17 of them may be working and available at any point in time and of those 17, 13 of them in the health system may be committed to taking care of COVID patients.

“That means that at any point in time the number would fluctuate for obvious reasons because in this business that we are in it’s a very dynamic one. Patients come on or come off.”

He continued: “We are realistically talking about three or four ventilators available or as happens on some days one available or as happens sometimes in a moment none because the last one has been used. So, we do have moments when there’s no ventilator available and then we pivot out of those moments because of the dynamics of healthcare.

“Things do not stay the same from moment to moment and so a ventilator may be freed up if a patient gets better or the patient even dies.

“So, these are the realities of what we do and so we’ve seen unfortunately much more of a challenge on our ventilators recently and it’s not uncommon over the last two weeks especially to see that our ventilators have been occupied daily up to 13 or 14 ventilators occupied per day, which is only giving us two or three available.”

While it wrangles with these issues, Dr Diggiss said officials there are looking at how to remedy staff shortages.

“We continue to try to get the retired nurses to see whether they would return working in the non-COVID space so that our regular nurses who are working in the COVID space could be freed up for that. Fortunately, we’ve had some good responses from our healthy retired and fit willing to work nurses and so I must give them a commendation. Thank you so much for stepping back into the fight.

“We continue to try to get nurses from out of The Bahamas. This is quite a fight because COVID has become so significant and a draw on nurses worldwide that the campaign in the United States to draw nurses is so strong that it’s not a fair fight when it comes to offering whatever the United States decides to offer so that it can get through this particularly difficult time.

“So, unfortunately we may continue to lose our nurses to attrition to the United States specifically or other areas where they also have shortages.”

He said there must be a continued effort to ensure nurses on staff are taken care of.

“We also have to take care of any healthcare worker dealing with the front line. We just have to support them. When there is a break for them to take a step back and avoid burnout and fatigue then we have to continue to support them (and) give them counsel when they need it.

“So, those are the strategies. We continue to look whenever healthcare providers are available especially like I say in the space of nursing and nursing related and respiratory therapists we continue to look out for them,” Dr Diggiss said.