The hospital has even brought in a row of brown reclining chairs, lined up against a wall, for patients who aren't sick enough for a stretcher but are too sick to stay in the main waiting room. That means people coming to the ER are being warehoused for hours, even days, forcing ER staff to perform long-term care roles they weren't trained to do.Īt Sparrow, space is a valuable commodity in the ER: A separate section of the hospital was turned into an overflow unit. Emergency departments are ideally meant to be brief ports in a storm, with patients staying just long enough to be sent home with instructions to follow up with their primary care physician or being sufficiently stabilized to be transferred 'upstairs' to inpatient units or the intensive care unit.Įxcept now, those long-term care floors are full too, with a mix of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients.

As overworked nurses leave, she struggles to staff every shift and works hard to keep remaining nurses from burning out.īut there's nowhere to put them all. Tiffani Dusang is the director of emergency and forensic nursing at Sparrow Hospital.

Even in parts of the country where COVID-19 isn't overwhelming the health system, patients are showing up to the ER sicker than they were before the pandemic, their diseases more advanced and in need of more complicated care. Visits to emergency departments dropped to half their normal levels, according to the Epic Health Research Network, and didn't fully rebound until the summer of 2021.īut now, they're too full. Terrified of contracting COVID-19, people who were sick with other things did their best to stay away from hospitals. were often eerily empty in the spring of 2020. Except for initial hot spots like New York City, many ERs across the U.S. It's a stark contrast to where this emergency department - and thousands others - were at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

But they have to be in the hallway with, as you can see, 10 or 15 people walking by every minute.'

'I always feel very, very bad when I walk down the hallway and see that people are in pain or needing to sleep or needing quiet. This story was produced in partnership with Kaiser Health News.īut there's nothing she can do.

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