ROCHESTER, N.Y. — As flu cases surge in Monroe County and across New York State, local hospitals are operating beyond capacity and that is causing delays for EMS crews and patients.
“The system is just highly overloaded at the moment and it just continues day after day after day,” says Mike Witkowski, the COO of Monroe Ambulance.
If you drive by any of the ambulance bays at our local emergency departments, you’ll see that most of the time every single parking spot is taken by a rig. EMS agencies across the area say they are dealing with an increased volume of calls, many of which are from people dealing with respiratory illnesses.
Jonathan Smith is the Chair of the Monroe County EMS Chief’s Association, “in the context of all of the people who are sick here in Monroe County, they’re accessing the same 4 hospitals, which means that the hospitals, much like we need to, have to triage those folks and treat the folks who are most sick, first,” he says.
Shane O’Donnell, Deputy Chief of CHS Mobile Health, notes the impact on EMS crews, “the emergency department gets backed up and then our crews get backed up and are waiting to move the patients over at the hospitals, so, it kind of creates this whole system backlog,” he says.
Under normal circumstances, EMS crews can normally get a patient in and unloaded within an hour but there have been a number of instances lately where the crews are forced to wait 2-2.5 hours because of back-ups at the emergency department.
Monroe Ambulance has increased the number of rigs it puts on the road to address the increase in volume, “we were averaging anywhere between at peak time, 12-14 trucks, we’ve increased that up from there at this point to about 16,” Witkowski says.
O’Donnell emphasized the importance of calling an ambulance for life-threatening conditions, “those patients with shortness of breath, or chest pain that we think might be related to their heart or significant lung infection or who have a life-threatening infection, those people really do need an ambulance,” he says. However, he warns against assumptions about faster hospital access via ambulance. “A lot of people will assume that if I go by ambulance than I’ll get into the hospital really quickly and that’s just not the case.”
When someone calls 911 and requests an ambulance, paramedics assess the situation and can sometimes direct them to different paths to access care, “the conversations often center around things that are… what options do I have, what’s it going to be life when I go to the Hospital, will I go to the waiting room, how long will I wait, if I don’t go to the hospital, where else could I go,” explains Smith.
The most recent data on flu cases in Monroe County indicates that there are nearly 7,200 confirmed cases, 569 people are hospitalized and 11 people have died from the virus.
EMS crews see increased volume of calls amid flu surge WHEC.com.
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