While in the midst of making Friday night dinner, Sue Hagen had one of those accidents that happen to the best of cooks.
“I got my mandoline out, I was thinking I would do it quick without the guards or anything else and here I am going along and took the very tip of my finger off,” Hagen said.
Hagen waited for hours in an emergency room for treatment and ended up leaving, showing a harsh reality of how strained Arizona's healthcare system is right now.
Needing care
Since her accident happened on a Friday night, Hagen would find that the only urgent care in the town was already closed for the whole weekend.
“So I went to the ER and checked in,” Hagen said.
Hagen waited at Verde Valley Medical Center in Cottonwood. Hagen said she waited an hour and a half before getting seen by triage.
“They finally got me into triage, wrapped it up at least so it was absorbing the blood,” Hagen said.
All in all, Hagen waited for four hours before asking how much longer it’d be before she was seen.
“She said it could be at least another six hours,” Hagen said.
That's what prompted Hagen to leave and find a way to get the bleeding stopped on her own with items from a pharmacy.
“You would think that someone bleeding is really an emergency, but they had so many ambulances coming in and people with problems,” Hagen said.
Hagen said she doesn’t blame the hospital and is grateful for the health care staff’s work.
“I really feel like this is a crisis in our community,” Hagen said.
But she hopes another option for people needing medical care might become available as Arizona grows.
“I still feel as though we need to be looking at other ways so that people aren’t in there with sinus infections that could be potentially taken care of in an emergent care or even something like my finger that could have at least been stopped and x-rays taken somewhere else,” Hagen said.
A lack of beds
In the last two days, the Arizona Department of Health Services has reported only 5% of all inpatient beds in Arizona hospitals being available for patients.
“We’re extraordinarily busy,” Dr. Derek Feuquay, chief medical officer at Northern Arizona Healthcare said. “We are the busiest that we’ve ever been consistently day-to-day (in) the 12 years that I’ve worked here.”
Feuquay said he was just down seeing patients at Northern Arizona Healthcare’s Verde Valley Medical Center (VVMC) on Thursday.
“Yesterday they had 82 inpatients, which is the most they’ve ever had,” Feuquay said. “It’s not a big hospital, but 82 is the most they’ve ever had and they’ve hit that point twice over the past week and a half or so.”
Feuquay said VVMC is experiencing what many hospitals around the state are with a surge of COVID-19 patients and others needing care.
“There’s a ton of patients and because there are so many people that are admitted to the hospital that aren’t getting out of the hospital because they’re so sick new patients end up having to stay in the ER,” Feuquay said.
Earlier this week, Dr. Michael White, chief clinical officer of Valleywise Health, said he had patients holding in the ER due to a lack of bed space.
In a request to FEMA for more staff submitted by the state health department, Kingman Regional Medical Center said they too had patients holding in the ER.
“Emergency departments are functioning with sometimes half of their normal number of beds in order to see people who are coming in for maybe smaller things that they can then get treated to go home,” Feuquay said.
Left waiting
Feuquay said because of so many people needing care in the hospital, and beds being taken up by patients in the ER who’ve been admitted to the hospital, people with less urgent issues experience hours-long wait times.
“The situation gets to the point where you have six, eight, ten-hour waits and you have a lot of people that have minor problems but are still problems that they need to be seen,” Feuquay said.
He said some people, like Hagen, then leave without receiving care.
“Which is unfortunate because we want to help people but then we have to triage and see this person is sicker than that person,” Feuquay said.
Feuquay said while the hospitals are functioning despite being under serious strain, he’s concerned about what could come after people gather for the holidays.
“I wish more people could get on board with getting vaccinated because if that happened we wouldn’t be where we’re at right now,” Feuquay said. “And I’m not judging anyone, it’s just we would be in such a better place and probably not facing what we’re going to face over the next month or two.”
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