FEMA Providing Staff To Address IL Hospital Employee Shortages

ILLINOIS — With COVID-19-related hospitalizations at an all-time high across Illinois and hospitals fighting staff shortages due to fatigue and stressed-out medical professionals leaving for other jobs, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Wednesday that more assistance is on the way to provide care to patients who need it most.

Pritzker said that doctors and nurses offered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency have started arriving at local hospitals, and more are on the way in coming days. Pritzker said at a news conference that 2,048 health care professionals have been deployed across the state, including 919 that are on-site at hospitals hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic at a time when hospital administrators are all crying for more staff.

An additional 552 health workers will arrive by the end of next week to provide a reprieve for exhausted hospital workers who battle fatigue and long hours on a daily basis, the governor said. The governor also announced the creation of COVID reaction teams to respond to emerging crises at hospitals and other medical facilities. The teams currently have 237 field workers assigned by FEMA to assist local medical facilities, with another 340 scheduled to arrive over the next 10 days, Pritzker said.

As of Wednesday, state health officials reported that hospitalizations across the state have surged well beyond the all-time record of 6,175 COVID-19 patients. State health director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said only 9 percent of the state’s intensive care units are available and that while many believed that state health officials are seeing the peak of the omicron surge coming, hospitals “are bearing the brunt” of the pandemic’s burden, Ezike said Wednesday.

State officials are also helping local hospitals expedite federal requests for more assistance as medical facilities who are seeing surging patient numbers ask for more staffing help.

“Throughout this crisis, state government has had to be innovative and agile to find creative solutions to maintain health care capacity during this unprecedented crisis,” Pritzker said Wednesday.

Health officials have seen a small dip in hospitalizations in the past 24 hours, but not days previous. Ezike said that more than 7,100 people are currently hospitalized in Illinois with COVID-19 and the “vast, vast majority” — around 80 percent—are unvaccinated.

“Our healthcare workers are burning the candle at both ends, and in the middle as well, to care for COVID patients who could have avoided hospitalization if they were up-to-date on their vaccine,” she said at the news conference.

Pritzker said that starting this week, out-of-state healthcare workers are able to continue working in Illinois during the pandemic with expanded permission. The plan allows them to not only care for COVID-19 patients, but for patients in need.

Doctors who received their medical training outside the United States can now provide assistance to licensed doctors in Illinois. State officials also allowing out-of-state providers to lend telehealth services to patients in Illinois as long as there was a previous provider-patient relationship developed, Pritzker said.

“We are really trying to pull on every lever to get help throughout the state for all of our hospitals,” Ezike said, adding that the state has multiple contracts in place to provide nursing and other care to facilities in need.

She added: “Just having a (hospital) bed available for someone to lie on when you do not have the staff does not count as a bed that you can use.”