A Message from Randy Dodd, President, Adventist Health Tulare
Walk through our hospitals, and you’ll notice something: silence.
Our hospital corridors, usually bustling with caregivers and patients, have been unusually empty these past few weeks. Many of the beds in our inpatient units have gone unfilled. The number of patients suffering from heart attacks, strokes and chest pains has declined. Few emergency surgeries are being performed.
While fewer emergencies may sound like cause for celebration, we know that’s not the case.
Across the communities we serve, loved ones, including the elderly and medically vulnerable, have been delaying or avoiding care out of fear of coming to the hospital during a pandemic. In other cases, our community members feel a sense of duty to avoid the hospital to not overwhelm healthcare resources.
It’s not an isolated issue. The number of hospital visits are dropping around the world – an unusual occurrence at the tail end of flu season.
We’ve seen our community take extraordinary measures amid this pandemic to practice responsible social distancing, “flattening the curve” and keeping our healthcare workers safe. We’re grateful for that, but the measures – meant to prevent an unmanageable surge of COVID-19 patients – have had unintended consequences.
At Adventist Health, the number of people coming into our emergency department has decreased by more than half across our multi-state system.
This is distressing for those who are suffering from otherwise minor conditions that can worsen without immediate medical care. A man in one of our communities, for example, took a bad spill off his bicycle and fractured a bone. He called the hospital to see if it was safe to come in for treatment.
Let me answer his question for everyone who might be asking themselves the same thing during this pandemic: Yes, our hospitals are safe. Emergencies happen, and you should never delay care.
We recognize that some might fear going to the hospital during these uncertain times. But we should never let fear get in the way of receiving needed medical care. If we allow it to, then this pandemic will have indirectly claimed more lives and wreaked more havoc than it should have.
Our community has done its job socially distancing. That has provided us adequate time to prepare for any potential surge of patients, put into place infection prevention measures to halt the spread of COVID-19 within our hospital walls, and most of all, keep our patients and caregivers safe.
Now it’s time for us to continue doing our jobs keeping our community healthy.
Emergency care should never be put off or avoided, especially during a pandemic. Emergencies happen. Don’t delay your care.
I don’t think that low patient turnout is strictly due to social distancing because Tulareans are out and about as much as ever. With all this beautiful weather Lowes and Home Depot parking lots are filled as is Walmart and Target. Perhaps people are reticent to come to the ER” of any” hospital for fear they might be found to have symptoms of COVID-19. It’s kind of like being an Ostrich, keep your head in the sand just in case. Hard to deny a virus if someone is diagnosed with it especially if they are actively promoting that the virus is fake news being promoted by the media and Democrats.
I think I’ve read over and over that scheduled surgeries have been postponed because of Covid-19, and people have died because they were denied medical care. We’ve also had the news (Covid-19 is extremely contagious ) shoved down our throats and a lot of people have swallowed it , I mean look at the craziness all around us with the unprecedented lockdowns, and everything closed. I’ve also heard and believe that if a person dies at the hospital at this time your death will most likely be recorded as being caused by Covid 19. I don’t know what’s really going on, although I speculate on a few different scenarios, but I do know this lockdown , stay sheltered crap is not for our protection from a pandemic. I wouldn’t visit a emergency room right now if I thought I was dying.
Strange……”stay sheltered crap is not for our protection from a pandemic” and then leaping to “wouldn’t visit a emergency room right now if I thought I was dying”. Well if all is crap what’s your fear? It’s certainly not dying based on last sentence.