Hospital remains at capacity

At a time when medical facilities across the country are inundated with COVID-19 patients, Crook County Memorial Hospital is now functioning close to capacity at all times. The facility is also taking on virus-positive cases from nearby hospitals that have run out of room or available staff.

“We can take care of roughly four COVID-positive inpatients at a time, as long as our staff remains healthy,” says Crook County Medical Services District (CCMSD) CEO Micki Tucker.

At the start of the pandemic, CCMSD did not believe it would be able to accept patients suffering from the coronavirus. Things changed by necessity as the spread in this region became more serious.

“In the beginning, we did take the stance that we were not able to take care of COVID-positive patients because we did not have isolation rooms or negative pressure rooms,” Lyons explains.

“Unfortunately, we have no other options at this point. There are no open beds to send COVID-positive patients to, so we are doing our best to care for them in our hospital.”

At this time, most nearby hospitals are unable to admit new patients.

“With nearby facilities on divert, we continue to take patients from other facilities including Spearfish and Gillette most recently,” Lyons says.

“These facilities either do not have open beds or do not have the staff to cover the beds that they have and many patients are being sent to Omaha, NE and Kansas for hospitalization. In Sundance, we continue to take swing bed patients so that patients have a comfortable place to go for their rehabilitation.”

Lyons reports that Crook County Memorial Hospital has been at capacity for much of the past six weeks. This, of course, creates a situation in which the local facility may not necessarily be able to accept a new patient.

However, as more and more facilities reach capacity, the distance to the nearest open bed continues to increase.

“Just last week the ER provider had to call eight different facilities and finally got Billings to agree to take a COVID-positive patient that needed an ICU bed,” Lyons says.

“This has happened on more than one occasion.”

The scientific and medical communities have made strides in understanding the disease since it was first identified at the beginning of the year. This has solved one issue that originally affected CCMSD’s ability to take on patients: the concern that not enough intubation equipment would be available.

“We have not intubated any COVID-positive patients because the guidelines have changed and we know that the mortality rate increases exponentially when intubated,” Lyons says. 

“We try to make this a last resort.”