News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Rumors and suggestions that COVID-19 will soon overrun local hospitals and ICUs are simply not true, according to Cookeville Regional CEO Paul Korth.
“We are in a position to take care of those patients, we’re in a very good position to take care of a surge if it does happen,” Korth said. “We have policies and procedures in place to do what we need to do to take care of those patients. We are not completely full, our ICU beds are not completely full. We do have capacity left, but again, we are busy.”
The CRMC staff currently treating 24 patients with seven of those patients in ICU. Korth said both numbers have been fairly steady over the last two weeks. Since the pandemic begin, 179 patients have been treated for COVID at CRMC.
Korth said procedures are in place to limit the hospital population should COVID cases grow. He said many of the procedures are not unique to COVID.
“If a surge does happen, we have mechanisms in place to take care of those individuals,” Korth said. “We have not had to do that yet thank goodness. We’ve not had to expand to some of our other areas that we know we can take care of these patients in because we can take care of them.”
For example, Korth said the medical center could stop elective procedures or route certain types of patients to other centers around the region. This will be the third week CRMC has performed a handful of overnight elective procedures each night. CRMC shut those down when the COVID spike happened two months ago.
In addition to space, Korth said the medical center continues to be well-stocked with PPE, in some cases up to a thousand-day supply.
“We want to make sure that we had at least a four month supply of personal protection equipment in the facility,” Korth said. “Some things we have much more than four months on because we didn’t know what the situation was going to be and how we were going to be able to get those.”
Korth said 59 employees have tested positive, that’s less than 2.5 percent of the staff. An aggressive visitation policy has helped limit those numbers, Korth said, to keep employees serving patients. And that helps the medical center be prepared for a surge.
“If we had a large number of those employees go out and have to be quarantined for 10, 14, 24 days, whatever that time is, we don’t we wouldn’t have the backfill and we would have to shut down some services,” Korth said.
