ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Tuesday marks five years since the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic and Monroe County saw its first case of the virus. Since then, the COVID virus has killed more than 2,300 people in Monroe County alone.
In the early days of the pandemic, when there were more questions than answers, the chief medical officers at local hospitals met every day with staff and each other to assess capacity, staffing and equipment needs. They also held zoom briefings weekly to share emerging information and data with the public in an effort to keep the community informed and protected but looking back, things were changing by the hour.
“The concerns, the uncertainty of what was going to happen, how are we going to take care of the community, how are we going to provide care that they need, it consumed our days” remembers Dr. Michael Apostolakos, the Chief Medical Officer at Strong and Highland Hospitals.
They didn’t know if they had enough beds, ventilators, or people to care for those who would become sick.
“Healthcare workers at the beginning of the pandemic, didn’t know if they themselves would survive right, that’s pretty amazing that they showed up every day and took care of these patients,” says Dr. Robert Mayo, Chief Medical Officer at Rochester Regional Health.
In the years since, they’ve learned a lot. “In every crisis, there really is a silver lining and there are things that come out of through just the brute determination of human creativity and human will and technology really is one of those big changes,” says Dr. Mayo.
“We have to look at new ways to efficiently take care of patients, can we use virtual sitters, can we use virtual nurses can we do more things digitally that saves people time, makes them more efficient and be able to take care of as many or more patients with less physical resources and more virtual resources,” adds Dr. Apostolakos.
There was a health care staffing shortage before the pandemic, but since, it’s become a healthcare staffing crisis.
“There’s a newer group of people that accept the challenge and know that’s part of what we do to take care of the community but I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to the same staffing levels that we had,” says Dr. Apostolakos.
The pandemic created a desperate staffing situation particularly in nursing homes, many of which don’t have enough nurses to take on all the patients who need a bed. So, those patients are continuing to back up in the hospitals. “It’s difficult to staff and to pay people what they deserve in order to take care of patients, so I don’t think there’s a lack of people who want to work in nursing homes, I think there’s a lack of people that can financially do it to take care of the community,” says Dr. Apostolakos.
An increase in the Medicaid reimbursement rate for nursing homes might help, but it’s not being discussed at this point.
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Five years later: How the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped Rochester’s healthcare system WHEC.com.
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