With state leaders estimating that Connecticut’s winter COVID-19 surge won’t hit its peak until January, concerns about staffing and capacity at hospitals across the state are intensifying.
Hospital officials so far have said they are not pulling back on elective surgeries and outpatient procedures as they did in the spring – a move that allowed them to shift staff and other resources to the growing number of coronavirus patients. COVID-related hospitalizations on Monday reached 1,098, and industry leaders have said there could be as many as 1,700 this winter in a “best case” scenario.
Jennifer Jackson, president of the Connecticut Hospital Association, said facilities are reluctant to scale back elective surgeries because many patients had put off care during the spring, allowing diseases to progress and conditions to worsen. But she also acknowledged that the widespread cancellation of those procedures put hospitals – already hemorrhaging money because of increased expenses linked to staffing, personal protective gear and other supplies – in a financial bind.
Hospitals are still closing the books on their fiscal year that ended in September, but the losses are expected to be sizable. Officials have estimated that, systemwide, the facilities may have lost as much as $1.5 billion.
“There’s certainly been talk about elective procedures, but it’s really been focused on how do we make sure, to the extent possible, that we preserve them,” Jackson said. “Last spring, we really saw a negative outcome at two levels. We saw people coming into the emergency department with diseases that had progressed in ways that were heartbreaking, and that they didn’t need to if they had gotten intervention. … And also there are really significant financial implications. Hospitals took a devastating hit. So we are concerned about that, too.”
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