North Texas hospitals are monitoring the numbers of respirators and critical care beds, limiting entrances, ensuring they have ample personal protective gear and taking other steps in response to the escalating coronavirus outbreak, the head of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council says.
Steve Love, the council’s president and CEO, said he’s confident DFW hospitals are prepared if there is a surge in cases – although for a variety of reasons Love couldn’t quantify how big of an outbreak the local institutions could accommodate.
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DFW has an advantage in that many of its roughly 90 hospitals are part of large hospital systems that have been stocking up on respirators and protective gear since late December and early January after seeing how hard COVID-19 hit China, Love said.
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Love discussed capacity for coronavirus patients, what hospitals are doing differently and more in the interview that follows:
In sheer numbers, how large of an outbreak could the hospitals in North Texas handle?
It’s not an easy answer, and let me tell you why. We monitor daily the PPE (personal protective equipment). We monitor the critical care beds. We monitor the number of respirators. We have flexibility to know where they are regionally, so we could share if needed. But, for example, some hospitals have X number of critical care beds and they have other beds that they could turn and use as critical care beds if needed. Down the road, if we had a really bad surge, tents could be used and we could work with FEMA, we could work with the Department of Defense and really expand the capacity quickly. That’s a worst case scenario.
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So, can we handle it? We feel we can. Can we expand quickly? Yes, because we’re working with all of the city and county emergency operation centers so that we are communicating. It’s hard to say exactly (how many cases the system could handle), but we’ve always been able to handle (outbreaks like H1N1 and Ebola) in the past, and we have the same wherewithal to deal with this.
What are North Texas hospitals doing differently since the coronavirus outbreak?
We started doing work back in January. We have 90 hospitals in the DFW area, but what makes us unique is that many of those are members of large hospital systems – Baylor Scott & White, THR, Methodist, Medical City. When their material managers saw what was happening in India and China at the end of December and the first part of January, and when even the hint was that this could potentially one day be a pandemic, they started increasing their inventory of PPE. They also started looking at their number of respirators, their masks, and gradually increasing the inventory. Our hospitals are daily monitoring their PPE, their material management, and we feel like all of our hospitals are ready to respond. That was step one.
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What was step two?
When the CDC started putting out information about the coronavirus and how we needed to start questioning people regarding travel and then they started showing level two and level three countries, our hospitals responded well. And, as you know, Ebola came to town a few years ago, so we were very attuned to, ‘Let’s ask people where they traveled, where they’re coming from, do they have a lower respiratory issue, are they having shortness of breath,’ etc. Hospitals put that in place very quickly to start screening patients.
What else has changed?
The third thing they did is the CDC changed some of the screening and criteria and said, ‘Now we need to start testing.’ Hospitals immediately would mask the patient, mask the employee, put them in isolation, keep them in isolation and then have the test run.
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What message would you like to get out?
If you’re feeling well and not running a fever and exhibiting none of the symptoms, please don’t come to the hospital and demand to be tested. We don’t want to use a test kit unless it’s deemed medically necessary by the professional that’s examining you. Some of the drive-through locations, like Parkland, only the patients that have a physician order are going there to be tested. It’s not like people are walking in off the street.
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