PALO ALTO (KRON) - In the last two months, Stanford Medicine has accepted over 500 transfers from medical institutions in other regions who have been overwhelmed from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of 548 transfers from Nov. 1 to Jan. 5, 47 patients had COVID-19, and 494 had other conditions, a situation the associate chief nursing officer of inpatient access Rudy Afhoer says has worsened since the holidays.
“Around Thanksgiving, when the numbers of hospitalized COVID-19 patients started to increase, some of the other hospitals in the county started to experience difficulties,” Afthofer said. “At that time, the medical director for the county asked hospitals to work on a way to level the patient load across institutions.”
The transfers are part of a mutual aid agreement among local and regional hospitals, with Stanford waiving the typical insurance clearance processes and administrative steps normally typical when a patient moves from one facility to another.
The center says the crisis is also worsening closer to home with 135 of the transfers coming from Santa Clara County.
This is not the first time the medical center has accepted an overflow of patients. Early in the pandemic Stanford took transfers from Southern California’s Imperial Valley, according to Stephen Ruoss Director of Stanford's transfer center.
“The hospitals in that region didn’t have the capacity to care for the number of patients they were admitting, so several — some very sick — patients were transported from their emergency departments to Stanford for care," Ruoss said. We were happy to accept them. It was what we should do, and what we did.”
from KRON4 https://ift.tt/3icRewc
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