By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Dr. Scott Pauly with the Hutchinson Clinic is looking for help, as the COVID-19 Delta variant is creating a human resource issue for both the Clinic and Hutchinson Regional Healthcare System.
"The current problem all across the region and across the state at this point, not just Hutchinson, is a resource, as in trained personnel problem," Pauly said.
The patients being hospitalized are younger, too.
"We went from having no positive outpatient tests for weeks, to having a trickle of positives, to having our COVID positive patients in the hospital overall having an average age, when you count the infants, it probably pulls the average age down into the teenage years," Pauly said. "That doesn't give you a full explanation, because, when someone is less than one year old, it pulls down the average age quite far, but I could tell you that, off the top of my head, I can't think of a patient with COVID-19 in the hospital right now above 40 years old."
Pauly acknowledges that not all the patients are being genotyped to know which variant they have, but regardless, he needs help.
"I don't have the staff to do what we did this fall and winter," Pauly said. "We are spread extremely thin. I know employers in all non-medical realms have felt that. We saw that in the health care field. Part of that is a lack of traveling nurses. Part of it is, we have some highly skilled, highly trained nurses who have said that they can't live through another pandemic like it was this fall and winter. Some of that was the amount of death and morbidity they saw. I'll be honest, a lot of it was the lack of support they saw from our local community. They are under the impression that these people in the local community just look at the outside walls of these facilities and say nothing looks different. Individuals don't understand that these young men and women went to war every day and they came home to a very unsupportive community."
Pauly is asking all retired, especially licensed, nurses in the area to call the clinic or the hospital if they can help. The most desperate needs are those who are critically care trained, ER trained, or capable of outpatient IV therapeutic administration.
Nurses who can work should call Kayla Orellana at HRMC at (620) 665-2227.