3:34
- ABC News
- November 21, 2020
Hospitals face critical staffing shortage
Twenty-two percent say they'll face a critical staff shortage in the next week.
3:34
Nurses at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, made the difficult decision to strike last week. Jim Gentile, a registered nurse at St. Mary’s, said they were being put in a dangerous situation because so many nurses have left that hospital for higher-paying jobs, leaving them without enough staff to deal with the surge.
“In two weeks we've doubled the number of COVID patients in our hospital and we thought we have to sound the alarm now because there are not enough nurses to take care of the patients,” he told ABC’s Brad Mielke on “Start Here.”
“That's called dangerous. It's extremely dangerous. When a patient comes to a hospital, they deserve a registered nurse to take care of them. If you have six to one ratio and they're all COVID patients and one starts to go bad, you spend the next two hours with that one patient. Those other five patients are totally ignored behind glass, behind isolation room. We can't even see them. It's dangerous.”
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/nurses-on-strike-st-marys-langhorne-pa-ap-201_hpEmbed_20201118-094810_3x2_384.jpg\")
Vice President Mike Pence told governors Monday the federal government was “ready to roll our sleeves up and meet those capacity needs” on staffing shortages.
The North Dakota Department of Health announced that 60 Air Force medical personnel were being dispatched to the state. And White House Spokesman Michael Bars said more than 2,100 federal medical personnel are on the ground around the country.
“Currently, several thousand public health and medical personnel have been surged across all 50 states, territories, and tribal nations to support frontline responders and our hospital systems, as well as over 21,000 additional federal personnel deployed throughout the U.S. to support the whole-of-government coronavirus response,” he said in a statement.
Federal agencies have sent medical staff to more than 10 states in response to requests for help over the last two weeks, the Federal Emergency Management Administration said in a statement Friday.
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/International/covid-houston-2-gty-rc-201119_1605798334228_hpEmbed_3x2_384.jpg\")
Some nurses from New York City are also traveling to parts of the country where the virus is more severe to repay the favor from hospitals that send hundreds of nurses to help when New York was the epicenter of cases in the U.S. in April.
Intermountain Healthcare in Utah announced that 31 nurses from New York City were helping in intensive care, emergency, and surgical units around the state. The system is also hiring more than 200 traveling nurses, officials said in a press conference Friday.
But nurses across the country say more staff isn’t the only thing they need. They say everyone in communities around the country need to wear masks and follow guidelines like social distancing and avoiding indoor gatherings to slow the rapid spread of infections.
\"Being an ICU nurse and feeling helpless—like, you can't even help your own family member. It was just terrifying.\"
— ABC News (@ABC) November 18, 2020
An ICU nurse in Idaho discusses the emotional toll of caring for COVID-19 patients and urges people to \"just wear your mask.\" https://t.co/ZEbbaWapJK pic.twitter.com/1VI8kL1ThO
CDC studies have shown that parts of the country that require people to wear masks see less of the virus circulating in the community. In Kansas, COVID-19 cases decreased 6% in counties that kept a mask mandate over the summer. But in counties without a mandate COVID-19 cases increased 100%.
The CDC says wearing a face mask provides protection from exposure to the particles that carry the virus for both the person wearing it and anyone they come in contact with.
Public health experts say if 95% of Americans wore a face mask consistently it would make it much more difficult for the virus to spread, possibly preventing as many as 130,000 deaths.
“Everyone’s saying ‘it’s the year of the nurse,’ you know, health care heroes, and the thing is we can all be heroes just by doing one little thing and that’s wearing a mask and keeping our six feet,” Sarah Grabauskas, an ICU nurse in Idaho told ABC News.
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