Hospital staff shortages are causing at hospitals to close beds. In Michigan, two of the largest health systems, Beaumont Health and Henry Ford Health System, have recently announced closure of a combined 300 beds, 180 and 120 respectively.
The national shortage of staff, in particular nursing, staff pre-existed the pandemic and has only exacerbated by Covid-19. Nationally, demand for intensive care and emergency nurses increased 186% during 2020. It comes due to a combined effect of early retirement/burn out and the increase demand for one to one patient care requiring specialized training to operate machines such as ECMO.
ECMO, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, oxygenates a patient’s blood outside then pumping it back in. This machine is the highest level of life support available to patients as it basically functions as a heart and lung outside the body. Patients receiving care on ECMO must receive one-on-one nursing care 24 hours a day and requires the most attention. The labor-intensive process further pushes to high rate of burn-out amongst nurses and thereby forcing the cycle to repeat.
While some hospitals have taken the step to limit hospital beds, others are forcing nurses to far exceed the 1:1 requirement. At a recent evening in a Metro-Detroit area hospital a nurse identified that the ICU department was so short staffed that they were on a 3:1 ratio, with several patients on ECMO machines and the entire Emergency Department was staffed with only 2 nurses.
