Miami’s public hospital is once again halting non-urgent surgeries due to COVID spike
Slammed with a surge of COVID patients, Miami’s Jackson Health System announced Wednesday it would be limiting non-emergency surgeries starting next week.
The decision, effective Monday, follows a two-week period in which the number of COVID patients at the public hospital network and in the ICUs has doubled, according to Carlos Migoya, Jackson Health’s CEO. At the start of the week, the hospital system had about 265 COVID patients — roughly 80 of them in the ICU.
The rise in patients has also prompted hospital leaders to advertise for 78 additional nurses, Migoya told the Miami-Dade County Commission during a meeting on the pandemic Wednesday. He said they’ve already filled about half of those positions.
“Are we having a challenge staffing? Absolutely,” Migoya said. “We’re working very diligently with the union in adding shifts.”
Mayor Carlos Gimenez said he was convening a meeting of hospital CEOs across the county to ask them to take similar steps on elective procedures in order to create more beds for COVID patients.
Gimenez’s administration also is reviewing “surge” plans for hospitals to deal with overflow should beds get full. A Florida contractor last month dismantled a field hospital built at the county’s Tamiami Park in late March, but continues to maintain an empty 450-bed facility at the Miami Beach Convention Center.
Even with daily testing counts up significantly, the portion of results coming back positive for COVID remains nearly double the 10% threshold Miami-Dade established as safe when Gimenez lifted business closure orders in May. Gimenez told commissioners that rising positive rates are “corresponding with an increase in the number of people going into the hospital.”
Positive COVID results for Jackson staff members have risen from 7% to 12% in the last month, Migoya said. He added that most workers are catching the virus outside of the hospital.
Migoya told commissioners reducing surgeries and other elective procedures would get Jackson ready for what he predicted would be a “hot” month for COVID admissions in July. He said the hospital is already seeing signs of strain, including an increase in the portion of Jackson workers testing positive and a growing backlog in lab results.
Jackson’s nurses and doctors have been sounding the alarm recently as capacity and staffing have been stretched thin. At the commission meeting, Helga Segura, a registered nurse at Jackson, called in to say that the hospital is seeing an “enormous amount of patients with COVID-19.”
“Our hospital’s capacity is being pushed to the limit right now,” Jackson nurse Helga Segura told county commissioners during an emergency meeting on the board to discuss Miami-Dade’s COVID response. “Where do we go from here? Once hospitals meet capacity, do we have a plan for that?”
At testing sites across Miami-Dade, demand has skyrocketed. While the county was recording about 1,000 tests a day in early June, the latest tally put that figure at 4,000. Migoya said while testing is far more available than when it was at the start of the coronavirus crisis in March, results are lagging and Jackson can’t get the materials it needs to test quickly on its own.
“All these labs that the tests are going to are getting pressure by the entire country. Now there’s a delay between three and five days,” Migoya said. “We’re doing our own testing. The problem we’re [having is] our reagents for our labs are being limited. We’re getting slowness in our own labs as well.”
This story was originally published July 1, 2020 at 11:02 AM.
