Unlike in March, when Gov. Tim Walz ordered health care providers across the state to put a pause on elective surgeries that lasted nearly two months, St. Luke’s and Essentia Health-St. Mary’s are regularly evaluating the status of the pandemic as well as hospital capacity and staffing to determine how much they need to curtail elective procedures, which are non-emergency surgeries planned in advance.
St. Luke’s has not accepted any elective surgeries this week, St. Luke’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Nicholas Van Deelen said in a news conference hosted Thursday by the city of Duluth.
“We hope … to be able to revert back to our standard operating procedure,” Van Deelen said. “But that really depends on all of us (doing) the right things.”
Van DeelenSubmitted
St. Luke’s is currently in the second tier of a three-tiered COVID-19 response plan developed in March. That means the health care system is now operating above normal capacity due to the state of the pandemic, Van Deelen said. Necessary changes include adjusting staffing and preparing employees to help outside their normal areas of work as well as dedicating a unit of 40 beds just for COVID-19 patients and adding 24 additional critical care beds to the existing 25.
Should St. Luke’s enter the third tier, clinical resources will be entirely devoted to caring for patients with COVID-19. However, under current circumstances, Essentia Health and St. Luke’s doctors emphasized that most services are available and people should continue seeking care.
Dr. Jon Pryor, president of Essentia Health’s East Market, said the health care system moved most of its elective procedures at from Duluth’s Essentia Health-St. Mary’s Medical Center building to Essentia Health’s Miller-Dwan building a few blocks away, in order to reserve one for those who are sicker, with or without COVID-19.
Essentia Health has been transferring elective surgeries from the Duluth hospital to the Superior hospital and is in the process of moving some to Virginia and Moose Lake, Pryor said. He cited knee and hip surgeries as procedures that have seen a reduction.
“As we get further in the pandemic that will only ramp up,” Pryor said. “Because again, it’s important that we keep beds, both ICU beds and (medical surgical) beds, available for patients who need them for care and for the unexpected. This will only get worse as the pandemic continues.”
Jon Pryor
The hospitals also consider how much care and inpatient treatment a patient would need when deciding whether to carry out the procedure. Urgent and emergency care surgeries are being done as they usually are.
To help overwhelmed hospitals elsewhere, Essentia Health has taken in patients from the Twin Cities as well as Michigan and Wisconsin, though Pryor said the health care system is trying to take fewer people from other states to reserve room for Twin Cities patients.
“We’re being very careful and purposeful about these transfers and about doing surgery, any elective surgery, where they need an inpatient bed so that we keep room in ICUs and on the (medical surgical) floors for these patients,” Pryor said. “We want to be available for all of Minnesota.”
Hospitalizations fluctuate on daily, sometimes hourly, basis. For the last few weeks, St. Louis County has continued reporting new all-time highs for the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19.
St. Luke’s has also received patients from elsewhere, particularly from surrounding communities, with the help of coordination at the state level.
“That’s seems to be working quite well. We are all challenged, I think, in regards to staffing,” Van Deelen said.