UK HealthCare closing some operating rooms & patient rooms to focus on COVID patients
Like many other hospitals across the state, the University of Kentucky’s health care system is scrambling to quickly shift its resources to meet the increasingly heavy demand of treating an influx of COVID-19 patients.
In a Tuesday evening email to UK HealthCare staff, Dr. Mark Newman, executive vice president of health affairs, outlined a series of steps the system is taking to pour more resources into treating these patients, including closing a portion of Albert B. Chandler Hospital to “pull nursing resources from there to the COVID units.”
The number of hospitalized coronavirus patients across Kentucky has exploded in the last eight weeks because of the more transmissible Delta variant, ballooning from 201 total patients on July 1 to a record 2,014 on Tuesday. A record number of COVID-19 patients are also filling the state’s ICUs (589) and breathing on ventilators (338). Some hospitals are beginning to buckle under the weight.
“We have done as much as we can to absorb the influx without affecting our services to the many other patients who need our care,” Dr. Newman told staff. “This week we are taking the following actions to support patient flow and respond to increasing activity in our emergency departments.”
Those other actions include: closing five operating rooms at Chandler each day starting Thursday to “lower the need for beds”; dedicating 24 beds in the emergency department to “primarily care for patients with respiratory illness;” converting treatment spaces in the pediatric emergency department at Kentucky Children’s Hospital and Good Samaritan’s emergency department to negative pressure to create more capacity; and relocating neonatal ICU patients to Chandler in order to increase capacity at the children’s hospital; adding negative pressure inpatient rooms at the children’s hospital to treat more kids with coronavirus; and working with other hospitals to “evaluate and control” the number of patients transferred to UK.
On Wednesday morning, UK HealthCare was treating 94 COVID-19 patients, including three under the age of 18; 88% of those patients are unvaccinated, according to the university.
Roughly 45% of the hospital’s total coronavirus patients are in intensive care — 40 adults and two kids. Both kids are on a ventilator, along with 32 adults.
The hospital is caring for 20 additional patients who previously had COVID-19 but are no longer actively infected. “They’ve been here long enough that the infection itself is gone, but they’re too sick to leave,” a UK spokeswoman said.
The number of coronavirus patients at UK has grown by nearly 30% in the last week alone. On August 18, the hospital was treating 73 people with COVID-19, including five kids, 90% of whom were unvaccinated. There were 28 people in the ICU, including one pediatric patient, and 23 adults on a ventilator.
Dr. Newman, in his email to staff, said the steps the health care system is taking “will help us meet today’s demand. I encourage you to view these steps as our health care team flowing to support those working the frontlines of COVID, [and] we will be ready to take further steps if needed.”
