400-bed field hospital for COVID-19 patients to be built in Kentucky’s Nutter Field House
In preparation for a potential surge of COVID-19 patients, UK HealthCare said it is planning to construct a 400-bed field hospital at the Nutter Field House.
The state’s largest hospital system announced its plans for the “turnkey temporary medical facility” Friday morning, and said it will be constructed over the next two weeks. The Nutter Field house is the UK football team’s practice facility. It’s on the south side of campus, near Kroger Field.
“As the Commonwealth’s health care provider for advanced and critical care, it is essential that we are prepared for any scenario to ensure we are meeting the needs of our community and the [state],” Dr. Mark Newman, UK’s executive vice president for health affairs, said in a news release.
“We need to do whatever is necessary to ensure that highest quality of care is provided to meet the challenges associated with this unprecedented public health crisis,” Newman said.
The field hospital will contain 400 partitioned rooms, heavy duty cots, break rooms, a nebulizing station for breathing assistance, shower and sanitation units, laundry services, and temporary generated power, ensuring potable water for food services, showers and restrooms, according to the announcement.
This is the university’s first major move to accommodate a projected spike in novel coronavirus patients over the next several weeks that Gov. Andy Beshear has repeatedly warned about. So far, more than 821 people in Kentucky have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and at least 30 have died.
Efforts are underway to broaden hospital capacity to care for these patients across Kentucky, as medical systems work to both procure more personal protective equipment — masks, face shields, gowns, gloves — for frontline workers, and as hospitals expand intensive care unit capabilities and work to acquire more ventilators.
The UK HealthCare system, which includes UK Chandler and Good Samaritan hospitals, has a total of 945 beds, but capacity for almost 1,200, Newman said. The system has the ability to nearly double its ICU rooms to more than 300.
Earlier this week in an interview, Newman said, based on UK’s projections of patient demand at peak outbreak, “I think we would reach capacity,” necessitating the need for an overflow field hospital. A 2,000-bed field hospital is being built with help from the Army National Guard and at the Kentucky Exposition Center on the fairgrounds in Louisville, Beshear said on Thursday.
Of UK’s field hospital, it’s a “facility that we hope we don’t need,” Newman said. But, “Should we need the beds,” he said, “we wanted scale [and] the ability to be able to respond to potentially worst case scenarios.”
Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton on Friday morning said the city and medical community have been coordinating for weeks “to make sure we can meet the need [and] the demand we know is coming for medical care as the number of COVID-19 cases grows. Today, UK is taking us much closer to our goal.”
At UK, there are currently eight patients being treated in the hospital with the viral respiratory disease. Since the first case was diagnosed early last month, UK has had 74 patients test positive, and another 10 tests are currently outstanding. The university’s in-house lab, which came online in late March, has processed 2,031 COVID-19 tests.
This story was originally published April 3, 2020 at 10:29 AM.
