SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Crouse and Upstate University hospitals are preparing to add more than 200 beds and press retired nurses and doctors into service if need be as coronavirus cases increase.
“It’s essentially wartime planning,” said Dr. Robert Corona, Upstate’s chief executive officer. “We can shift our plans on the fly.”
Syracuse’s hospitals are joining their counterparts nationwide in a mad dash to increase beds, staffing and ventilators to fight a pandemic that may overwhelm the health system. Syracuse hospitals could be called upon to treat thousands of patients stricken by coronavirus.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said the state might need more than 50,000 more hospital beds to deal with the crisis. Extrapolating from Cuomo’s statewide projections, Onondaga County could need 1,000 or more extra beds to accommodate patients when a wave of coronavirus cases hits. Of those, 400 to 600 would need to be high-level “critical care” beds, equipped with ventilators and equipment to give medication intravenously.
Corona and Dr. Seth Kronenberg, Crouse’s chief medical officer, talked to syracuse.com today about how their hospitals are bracing for that surge. Syracuse.com published a story Thursday about how the coronavirus could overwhelm hospitals. That story reported St. Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse is prepared to boost its bed capacity by 25%.
Upstate is the largest Syracuse hospital. On any given day it has about 650 staffed beds at its two hospitals downtown and on Onondaga Hill. Corona said Upstate could rapidly increase that to 752, the maximum number of beds it’s licensed by the state to operate.
He said Upstate could add even more beds than that because Cuomo recently issued an executive order allowing hospitals to expand capacity beyond their license limitations. One scenario under consideration by Upstate is setting up an undisclosed number of beds at some of its other locations in Onondaga County, according to Corona. He refused to identify those locations.
Onondaga County emergency planners are also working on providing more beds and temporary hospital space should hospitals get overwhelmed. County Executive Ryan McMahon this week said he did not anticipate any new construction, but the county could convert some facilities, which he did not name.
Corona said Upstate can quickly convert operating rooms into intensive care units.
“We are going to be looking at the demand on a day-by-day basis and making decisions based on really good intelligence data,” he said.
Crouse Hospital is prepared to add 75 or more beds.
To increase capacity, the hospital canceled elective non-emergency surgeries earlier this week. That move freed up beds because some elective surgery patients stay in the hospital for 24 hours or longer, Kronenberg said. Upstate and St. Joe’s have also canceled elective surgeries.
Crouse has plans to add beds if needed in its emergency department, medical-surgical floors and intensive care units, and open two units not being utilized currently. It is also prepared to convert private rooms into semi-private rooms.
On any given day Crouse has 300 to 350 staffed beds. That number can be increased by 25% or more if necessary.
“We will do whatever we need to do to meet the needs of the community,” Kronenberg said.
Both Upstate and Crouse have retired nurses and doctors on standby who have agreed to help out if necessary.
There’s been growing concern the U.S. and other countries do not have enough lifesaving ventilators to help people with severe cases of coronavirus breathe.
During a news briefing Friday, Cuomo said ventilators are “the greatest need” in the fight against the pandemic.
“Ventilators are to this war what missiles were to World War II,’’ Cuomo said.
Crouse has 70 ventilators, an adequate supply, according to Kronenberg.
Upstate has 60 ventilators and expects to get 60 more, Corona said. St. Joe’s also has 60.
“Everyone’s worried about getting adequate numbers of ventilators,” Corona said. He said that’s why the state has closed schools, ordered people to stay home and taken other measures to slow the spread of the virus. “The idea is to keep ahead of it so we don’t need ventilators,” Corona said.
Kronenberg said Crouse, like all U.S. hospitals, is concerned about limited supplies of face masks and other gear needed to keep nurses and other staff working with infected patients safe.
“We are doing everything we can to provide adequate PPE (personal protective equipment) to staff,” he said. “We have concerns over the supply. We are working collaboratively with other hospitals in the community to allocate PPE among the institutions.”
Upstate is using technology to help stop the spread of coronavirus.
It added an online coronavirus assessment tool to its website Thursday that can answer the public’s questions about the virus and whether they may need testing. The tool supplements Upstate’s coronavirus hotline (315-464-3979) that has handled more than 3,000 calls over the past week. The hotline has kept many patients out of hospital emergency rooms by referring them to a drive-through coronavirus testing program at the Syracuse Community Health Center.
Upstate developed the online tool in a joint effort with Microsoft. Corona said further enhancements to the tool will allow Upstate to use bar code technology to follow up with individuals recommended for testing. Corona said the goal is to use the technology to help track people who’ve been exposed to individuals with the virus and need to be quarantined. He said similar technology helped slow the spread of coronavirus in South Korea.
“The way we are going to win this is through the use of technology,” he said.
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James T. Mulder covers health news. Have a news tip? Contact him at (315) 470-2245 or jmulder@syracuse.com