PORTLAND, Ore — Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) is facing a fresh round of capacity issues and is having to divert patients to other hospitals and reschedule surgeries, according to a message from the hospital's executive leadership team sent to staff on Thursday.
Even though COVID-19 hospitalization rates have declined statewide over the past two months, the hospital is seeing more patients than ever before in its emergency department and is experiencing a critical lack of intensive care unit beds.
The lack of beds is a problem throughout the Portland metro area, OHSU said, and other city hospitals are seeing similar issues.
"Oregon has the lowest per capita hospital bed count of any state in the country," said Dave Northfield with the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems. "Generally that's a good thing because we have a very efficient system. But when you take that same system, add a pandemic on top of it and then layer on a staffing crisis, it creates a really terrible situation."
The capacity crunch is being caused by multiple factors, according to an OHSU spokesperson, including still-relatively-high rates of COVID-19 patients and an influx of non-COVID patients who have been transferred from elsewhere in the state.
There are also patients who may have deferred care earlier in the pandemic and now require more critical care as a result, and a staffing shortage at the hospital is exacerbating the situation.
"They are showing up now, and their conditions are more severe, so they might be staying in the hospital longer," Northfield said.
The letter mentions that the OHSU nursing administration is activating "surge plans" to find more nurses as soon as possible, and that nurse directors and managers are providing bedside care. Finding more staff may prove to be difficult.
"One out of five healthcare workers has quit during the pandemic. They may have left the profession, they may have gone somewhere else to work, but that has created a really severe staffing shortage," Northfield said. "This is not just an Oregon problem. This is a national problem. So it's not as if there are other nurses, other clinicians who are available to hire and come to Portland. There aren't."
Click here to see a breakdown of hospital bed capacity across Oregon.