With strike at Lifespan, Kent ups staffing
As the Lifespan nurses’ strike continues this week, Kent County Hospital has had to adjust to an influx of patients in their emergency department with increased staffing, according to Care New England spokesperson Jim Beardsworth.
Beardsworth said Wednesday that it has been busier this week, but Care New England, which operates Kent, Woman and Infants, Butler, the VNA, and the Providence Center, had been continuously planning for the strike in the past few weeks. He said that this planning has allowed Kent to manage the additional patients once the strike began on Monday.
That influx has been in the range of 30-40 extra patients in the emergency department at Kent, Beardsworth said. He said the average per day is between 170-180 patients, and on Monday they saw 222 come through, then Tuesday he had the count at 210.
“It’s been very busy, but it’s not something out of the scope of our capabilities,” he said. “We make sure had had the right staffing, we’ve been planning in advance and gathering the numbers we needed.”
He said that wait times usually operate like an “ebb and flow,” and on Tuesday the hospital actually had a shorter wait than they’ve had on some of their normal days.
“We plan for a patient surge regularly,” Beardsworth said. “It happens during flu season, hurricane season, blizzards, this is something we prep for, we drill for, knowing at any time an issue could arise that brings more people to our doors. The situation is somewhat unique, but the fact that we got busier wasn’t.”
Beardsworth also said that there has been increased staffing this week, with nurses being able to pick up extra shifts and workers of all kinds, including doctors, nurses, “techs,” housekeepers, and dietary staff, have been on call to accommodate any extra business.
Lifespan spokesperson David Levesque said that Rhode Island Hospital came off diversion, which is when a hospital sends emergency transports to other places because they can’t handle the influx of patients, on Tuesday.
Beardsworth said that Kent has actually only seen “a handful of ambulance runs from areas we wouldn’t normally see,” and added that it wasn’t a huge increase of incoming transports when RI Hospital was on diversion.
Levesque couldn’t say how many diversions there were because calls are sent out to EMS, so RI Hospital doesn’t know how many patients are being sent to other hospitals in the state.
He did say that there was a 10 percent increase in the patients going to another Lifespan hospital, Miriam, in the past few days, which he called “pretty substantial.”
The strike itself, Levesque said, is still ongoing this week and will end Friday, July 27 at 3 p.m. when the Rhode Island Hospital and Hasbro Hospital nurses return to work. He said that there haven’t been any significant progress made at the “bargaining table” as of Wednesday afternoon, and he expected there to be a “little bit of a cooling off period” before contract negotiations are continued.
