Allegheny Health Network Says It Is Not Accepting Patients From Florida And Other Southern States
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Some intensive care units in Florida have been stretched to capacity as tired and overworked nurses and doctors tend to patients stricken with the Delta variant.
In the past two weeks, those hospitals have reached out to neighboring states to take in patients who they don't have the capacity to treat. But those hospitals have been told there's no room. Now that those pleas have reached our region, Allegheny Health Network Chief Medical Officer Imran Qadeer said, sadly, the answer is the same.
"We are, unfortunately, unable to take those patients from Florida and other states," he said.
Allegheny Health Network has taken in some COVID-19 patients from West Virginia and Ohio, but AHN is reluctantly turning down patients from down south. The staffing beds here are full of patients with other medical conditions that were left untreated during the COVID-19 pandemic. And here and elsewhere, there aren't enough nurses.
"We've seen some critical nurse staffing shortages, which has limited the number of staffing beds and has limited our ability to take not only patients from neighboring states but also to schedule our own patients," Qadeer said.
Coronavirus admissions at Allegheny Health Network and UPMC remain low, and Qadeer attributes that to the relatively high percentage of people who are vaccinated in our region compared to the southern states.
"Those states have a really low vaccination rate compared to the northeast states, and a lot of the scientific community is now calling this a pandemic of the unvaccinated. I think it's taken a toll on health care workers and I can't urge strongly enough for people to get vaccinated," Qadeer said.
