COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho — Kootenai Health announced Wednesday the Department of Defense (DOD) is providing the hospital with 20 military medical personnel for at least the next five weeks to support their staff.
Kootenai Health and the DOD held a press conference Wednesday, regarding their efforts as the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients continues to climb in the state of Idaho.
During the press conference, Kootenai Health Chief of Staff Dr. Robert Scoggins said Kootenai Health is caring for 115 COVID-19 patients as of Wednesday. Forty of those patients are in critical care and 20 require ventilators. He said on average Kootenai regularly only has 26 ICU beds.
“This help couldn’t have come at a better time, our staff was stretched to the limit with how many patients we could care for,” Dr. Scoggins said. “The ICU nurses that they brought in are now helping us relieve some of the stress from our ICU nurses and other nurses in the hospital.”
The DOD team arrived on Sunday and were quickly trained on the hospitals systems. There are 14 nurses, four physicians and two respiratory therapists. The team will be at Kootenai Health for at least 30 days and that will be extended as needed.
Jeremy Evans, Kootenai Health Chief Regional Operation Officers, said that while this team is much needed to relieve stress on the staff, it will not pull the hospital out of the woods yet.
Dr. Scoggins expressed concerns over the return of students to the classroom in Idaho with no masking or social distancing regulations.
"The message that I'd like to send to people is that, we're, you know, we're at the limit of what we can handle at this facility. We've done a lot of things to expand our care to take care of more patients, but we just, it keeps growing," Scoggins said on Tuesday.
Separate rooms in the Health Resource Center are being used to provide monoclonal antibody therapy to COVID-19 patients who are not hospitalized.
In a press release Tuesday, Kootenai Health said it has stretched existing staff, hired additional contract nurses, expanded bed capacity, canceled elective surgeries and adjusted contingency levels of care to accommodate the COVID-19 patient surges and volume demands.
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare activated crisis standards of care for hospitals in North Idaho Tuesday morning after a surge in COVID-19 cases left too few hospital beds and medical personnel to care for all the sick.
Kootenai Health said hospital leaders participated on the Idaho Crisis Standards of Care taskforce, and the hospital submitted a request to the state on Monday to activate Crisis Standards of Care.
North Idaho is the first region to put crisis standards in place, although doctors in the Treasure Valley have warned repeatedly that those extreme measures could be put in place statewide if Idahoans do not act to stem the tide of infections.