The Colorado Hospital Association announced Wednesday that it is moving ahead with the highest level of its plan to ease transfers between hospitals — a point not even during the fall of COVID-19 and the worst increase in the winter of 2020. reached up.
State hospitals had been operating under the first phase of their relocation plan since August, when COVID-19 cases began to rise in Colorado as the Delta version took over.
Tier 1 was similar to a “buddy system” where smaller hospitals were linked with hospital networks that have more resources to coordinate transfers, said Kara Welch, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Hospital Association. They skipped Tier 2, which would involve transfer coordination at the regional level, and went straight to Tier 3, where hospital leaders across Colorado would work together, she said.
“The requirement is going to be statewide,” she said. “It’s really about maximizing what’s out there.”
The transfer plan, which was activated in November 2020, never progressed beyond Tier 1 last year.
Welch said the people in charge of transfers for the hospital system would meet about twice each day to find out where beds are available and which patients can move in them safely. For example, if a metro-area hospital needs to free up beds for sick patients, it may arrange for a transfer to a rural facility, where those who are recovering can complete their recovery. , He said.
Some of those two-way transfers happened last year, with sick patients moving to cities and recovering ones going to smaller hospitals.
Welch said a statewide order issued on Sunday laid the groundwork for all hospitals to accept transfers and move patients to Tier 3 by allowing them to move to any hospital that cares for their needs, even if it’s not the one they’re supposed to be. The patient will like The plan is to try to keep patients as close to home as possible for their convenience and to avoid the unnecessarily long journeys that tie up ambulances. But some patients can be cared for away from home, she said.
“We need to be able to move patients where the resources are,” she said.
Welch appealed to Coloradans to protect hospital capacity by getting vaccinated against COVID-19, wearing masks in public, avoiding crowds and washing hands frequently. While most hospitalizations currently are not caused by viruses, those that are most likely preventable in the short term, she said — are unlike heart attacks and strokes, where a person’s risk builds up over years or decades. Is.
“We really need help from the public,” she said.
