Our hospitals are near breaking point and need help

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By Darren Redic, Lisa LaPlante, Brian Ivie and Elise Cutter / For The Herald

As leaders of hospitals north of King County, we want to share with the public how national health care challenges are affecting us in the region.

Our communities rely on us for care and throughout the pandemic our staff have been on the front lines. We have weathered new and frightening variants, surges of corvid patients, supply chain disruptions and much more. Now, however, we are faced with a different kind of crisis that is affecting our ability to care for patients.

As people return to the hospital to seek care that has been delayed for up to two years, we are seeing patients with more advanced disease, worse symptoms and grimmer prognoses. We are also seeing the impact of crises in our communities, particularly an influx of behavioral health patients and patients seeking treatment for fentanyl and other substance use disorders. Our hospitals are busier than they have ever been, operating above capacity, while our workers are exhausted.

Many health care workers who endured the pandemic are now leaving the industry, either temporarily or permanently. The national talent pipeline is not sufficient to meet the need. Wage adjustments have allowed us to attract, hire and retain health care workers to an extent, but hospitals in Washington state still have thousands of open nursing positions. Hospitals are also experiencing a financial crisis after two years of reduced surgeries, delayed care, high labor costs and supply chain disruptions. We are not alone; health systems nationally have seen labor expenses jump 19 percent and supply costs jump 20 percent over the last two and a half years.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-our-hospitals-are-near-breaking-point-and-need-help/

[dwilso40641]

1. we will never

get health care costs under control as long as we have insurance as a middle man.

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

2. All together now :

Thank you donald trump for turning a deadly disease into a political football.

First it was a hoax started by the dems to interfere with his election chances.

Then it was created by the Chinese in a bio-weapons lab in Wuhan.

Then it could be cured by drinking bleach, gobbling hydroxychloroquin (a malaria drug), then shining a light up your ass. Then his dipshit followers wanted MDs to prescribe an anti-parasitic medicine used on animals with multiple stomachs, despite the fact that COVID is a virus, not a parasite, and depleting shelves of this vital medicine for the ranchers who needed it for their herds.

Then Jared Kushner highjacked vital supplies of PPE, having armed federal thugs stop trucks with weapons drawn and steal these supplies. That's when governors started accompanying supply trucks, with state police, from port to their states. Why that smug little bitch is still breathing mystifies me.

President Obama left a perfectly working mechanism in place to deal with disease outbreaks, but trump destroyed it all, because Obama created it, thereby leaving all of us to COVID's devastation of over a million Americans.

I could go on, but you get my drift.

A hale and hardy shout out to all medical workers across the nation for all you have done for all of us. You are overworked, underpaid, undercompensated and over-exposed to this disease yourselves. Yet, time and again you have risen to a challenge unprecedented in our lifetimes (Well, some of us. I am old enough to remember going to school with kids who had Polio.) Even when you had to wrap yourselves in garbage bags because PPE was so scarce, you didn't falter. You came to work. You protected all of us. You held the hands of the dying. Alone. Without loved ones to surround them in their last moments. You were the last faces they saw. You did so at the expense of your own lives and sanity. This nation will never be able to repay you or thank you enough.

God. Bless. Each. And. Everyone. Of. You. Precious. Angels.