Coping with Inpatient Bed Crunch as a Community
City officials plan on patients piling into the New Orleans convention center, where facilities are equipped with 1,000 hospital beds and expecting 1,000 more to somehow squeeze in. This isn’t a flashback to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina — this is April 2020. This is COVID-19.
New York City took to similar relief measures by sending for a US Navy hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, which docked last week in an effort to care for displaced non-COVID patients in the city hit hardest by the global pandemic. The ship has since opened its doors to COVID-positive patients as of April 7.
Moral of the story: If it can fit a sea of beds, it can be transformed into a hospital — a sentiment green-lit last Monday by temporarily-relaxed regulations urging those in charge of vast indoor spaces to optimize for COVID critical care. Dorm rooms, hotels, even extensive outdoor areas like Central Park are putting themselves to good use as makeshift medical havens — all in the spirit of alleviating the unprecedented overcrowding hospitals and hospital staff have been enduring since early March.
The process of staffing and transforming a completely non-medical space into a critical care facility is both painstaking and expensive — in the case of New Orleans Convention Center, $90 million dollars — which is why one of the regulatory changes made Monday deserves an even closer look.
Ambulatory Surgery Centers (ASCs), are now permitted to contract with local healthcare systems to provide hospital services to both COVID and non-COVID patients. These 5,000 centers around the country are already equipped with medical-grade ventilation, state-of-the-art equipment, capable medical staff, and some of the necessary hospital beds.
ASCs are a glimmer of hope for hospitals with beds lining their corridors, and a worthy, viable alternative for ASC owners and operators to avoid pausing operations. Most ASCs are completely closed or underutilized due to the mandatory pause on all elective surgeries as announced by the CDC — so why not tweak the real estate that most closely resembles hospital space into actual, usable hospital space?
HealCo’s mission to bring providers to communities that need them most has never rang more true. As the Airbnb for medical office and surgery center space, we’re committed to retooling Ambulatory Surgery Centers into COVID-19- specific hospital spaces. HealCo is a multi-sided marketplace that matches doctors and surgeons with people eager to help.
If you have an available space, equipment, supplies, or services for doctors to deliver care expeditiously, please get in touch here. Let’s get through this together.
