8 months of COVID battles prepared Fort Worth’s hospitals for this surge. Here’s how
Doctors and hospital officials have prepared and will react to a winter surge of COVID-19 patients with eight months of trial and error under their belts, giving them more confidence in caring for Fort Worth’s sickest.
In the time since the disease found its way into the city, doctors have learned how to better manage the symptoms and public health officials have developed better ways to respond to the spread.
John Peter Smith Hospital created an at-home treatment program that helps hold its hospitalizations at bay. The Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council said doctors in general are better equipped to treat the disease because of what they’ve learned. Cook Children’s has expanded its COVID-19 unit as patient counts soar. MedStar has even put in its own response to the coronavirus surge.
On Tuesday, Tarrant County’s public health director, Vinny Taneja, said there were only 36 ICU beds available in the county. How are hospitals planning to manage their available beds?
At-home programs
Dr. Steven Davis, the chair of internal medicine at JPS, said hospitalizations at the county’s only public hospital haven’t skyrocketed because of a newly formed at-home program that wasn’t available in July.
More than 100 patients are being monitored at home and about 35 of them, as of Wednesday, needed oxygen, which has been provided to them. Those 35 patients would have been hospitalized had they gotten sick in July, Davis said.
On Thursday, JPS was treating 73 COVID positive patients at the hospital, compared to more than 100 during the summer peak.
“As we’ve learned more about this disease and the management of the disease, we can see who is a good candidate to be able to manage at home with a lot of monitoring by us,” he said. “We’re not afraid to send folks back to the hospital as we need to, and occasionally we do, but with the way the program is arranged, we can make sure that it’s done safely. They don’t need to call an ambulance and they can get to the hospital comfortably and calmly.”
This program also keeps care staff available for sicker patients who are hospitalized.
Working together
Hospitals within Dallas-Fort Worth work together to make sure resources are never depleted.
“I think if we ever get to the point where JPS is taxed, I think that’s really truly at the point where the entire community is taxed,” Davis said. “And that’s where we cooperate with all other hospitals in town so we have a community plan. If one hospital gets taxed, we can rely on our colleagues at other institutions to provide care.”
MedStar, the region’s ambulance service, is also part of the surge plan, and crews have already carried out its worst-case scenario.
This week, ambulances have moved five patients downtown Fort Worth to an outlying hosptials, according to MedStar spokesman Matt Zavadsky.
MedStar worked with regional hospital systems back in May, he said, to prepare a “surge strategy” for what would happen if coronavirus hospitalizations reached a point where some patients might need to be moved.
Learning from experience
Joseph DeLeon, president of Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital, said his team is learning from the past to make it through the winter.
The hospital, which has 650 licensed beds, is already undergoing an expansion by almost 150 beds because the hospital ran at 100% capacity for four years, he said.
“We’re not at that capacity level right now, which is good,” he said. “But we’ve practiced a lot, if you will, for this type of business. The difference is that with COVID, there’s the added stress on the team taking care of patients everyday.”
DeLeon said patient care teams are also more confident in treating COVID patients because they’ve been doing it for eight months now, which is good because COVID-19 patients and persons under investigation at Texas Health hospitals have increased almost 75% over the past four weeks
MedStar’s response
MedStar has established its own full response to COVID-19. The number of patients in which MedStar crews identified possible COVID-19 symptoms increased by 158% between Oct. 1 and Wednesday.
As part of the surge strategy, MedStar spokesman Matt Zavadsky said MedStar is not sending COVID patients to hospitals if they have symptoms but are otherwise stable. This has been in effect since March. Another part of the surge strategy, which has started this week, is moving patients out of crowded hospitals if necessary, Zavadsky said. If a hosptial has no ICU beds, he said, MedStar can move a few of those patients to hospitals miles away, freeing up beds.
“That could either be within the Fort Worth side of the Metroplex, it could be across the Metroplex,” he said. “It could be across all of North Texas or beyond, depending on how bad the needs are in the local community.”
Reporter Jack Howland contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 20, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
