Ambulances backing up outside Lakeland Regional as EMS crews are ‘critically stretched.’
A burly man with an oxygen tube wrapped around his face was wheeled out of an ambulance outside Lakeland Regional Health Medical Center on Monday evening.
He wasn’t the only patient EMS workers were hurriedly trying to get from the stretcher into a hospital bed. Ambulances were backed up at the emergency room doorstep throughout the night.
These ambulances sat on the curb, unable to move as more and more 9-1-1 calls came in.
Lakeland Regional leaders at one point Monday evening sent out an urgent message to Polk County’s Fire Rescue team.
“They asked: Can you not bring us anyone for awhile?” Robert Weech, Polk’s Fire Chief, told the county commission Tuesday morning.
EMT workers steered patients to other hospitals when possible.
Much like their hospital counterparts, these first-responders are also being pushed to the limit, working extended mandatory overtime, coping with their own exhaustion and stress.
They’ve been handling roughly as many as 42% more 9-1-1 calls than usual of late. And that’s at a time when the county’s fire rescue division has 35 vacancies, and another 16 EMS employees are currently out of commission due to COVID-19, county officials say.
Weech is calling on Polk County residents to do what they can to relieve some of the strain.
“If you can avoid using the 9-1-1 system, this is probably a good time to do that,” he said. “The system is under strain. Certainly if you have an emergency, stroke, heart attack or if you have an accident, certainly call 9-1-1. But if you have other ways of getting medical care, you need to exhaust those at this time so that we can deal with those other bigger emergencies.”
‘Critically, critically stretched’
Polk County’s EMS division typically responds to 280 9-1-1 calls per day. In recent weeks, they’ve been getting an average of 340 calls per day. Some days, dispatchers answer as many as 400 calls.
“Usually the problem is in late afternoons,” Weech said Tuesday, “Our system picks up right around noon and it will extend to about 8 o’clock. And that’s when we are seeing our system critically, critically stretched.”
For the most part, Weech said his employees have been able to keep up and 70% of patients have not seen a delay in response times.
But in some parts of the county, ambulances are reaching patients as much as four minutes slower than usual, Weech said.
That’s due, in part, to the time it takes patients to get admitted once they arrive via ambulance at the hospital.
Hospitals have been feeling the squeeze throughout the summer.
On Monday, Lakeland Regional had 411 COVID-19 patients admitted, according to a Facebook post from Dr. Daniel Haight, an infectious disease specialist and vice president of Lakeland Regional’s community health.
Forty-nine of those were on ventilators. Sixty-five were on high-flow oxygen, he posted, adding that 95% of the COVID-19 ICU patients were unvaccinated. Meanwhile, a steady stream of ambulances carrying more patients were lined up outside.
“That bed transfer time is really critical for us,” Weech said. “Get the patient to the hospital, get them off our stretcher and get back into the system. That’s the critical hand-off that has to happen, and when we start to see those delays we get really assertive.”
He added, “We get our medical director on the phone and we say (to the hospital) that we have to see some relief; the system has to keep moving.”
Weech said that his team is in constant communication with hospital officials to reduce off-load delays as much as possible.”
“We are asking: What’s your status today? What is your capacity?” he said.