The California Department of Public Health on Tuesday ordered provinces with available intensive care facilities to accept transfer patients from overwhelming regions, a stop-gap measure designed to ease pressure on facilities suffering from the strain of the latest boom.
The new health order issued Tuesday night comes amid the declining availability of intensive care in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, where hospitals are under pressure from the influx of new cases of coronavirus spurred by holiday gatherings. Both regions report 0% availability of intensive care, according to state statistics for counting ICU beds.
“As hospitals overwhelm and overflow, they can no longer provide the traditional standards of care we expect, but if health care resources are available elsewhere, we need to make sure Californians can get the care they need,” he said. Tomás Aragón, director of California, said. public health, said in a statement.
The order requires provinces with many available ICU beds to accept patients from hospitals that have reached a crisis level, which means that they are unable to treat all patients adequately and that they need to ration resources. The patient transfers can start immediately and must be done “competently and safely” according to the instruction. Transfers can take place anywhere in the state.
It was not immediately clear how the order would affect the Bay Area, where some provinces have adequate availability of ICUs.
While hospitals struggled with an accelerated ICU bed crisis at the end of December, the state warned that overwhelming facilities were in danger of weakening to the standards of crisis care, in which staff would have to ‘make difficult choices about the allocation of treatments’ to patients.
The order also requires hospitals in areas most affected by the boom to stop elective surgery. Provinces in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley with less than 10% ICU capacity are needed to postpone non-essential operations. However, urgent medical procedures that are considered life-saving may continue in those provinces.
“We need to ensure that our entire healthcare system does everything in its power to prevent our hospitals from switching to crisis care standards for people who are seriously ill with COVID-19 or other critical medical conditions,” Aragon said.
Chronicle Staff Writer Erin Allday contributed to this report.
Nora Mishanec is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @NMishanec