PHOTO: Courtesy of Bellin Health
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — Hospital ICU’s are busy across the country.
Locally, Bellin Health Chief Nursing Officer Laura Hieb says they’re operating at greater than normal capacity.
“We’re running at about 112% of our conventional capacity,” she told WTAQ. “We’re much busier than we would be in a standard, pre-pandemic kind of environment.”
It’s not, however, just COVID-19 patients that are taking up bed space. Hieb says ICU patients are up in general.
“We want to take care of both needs,” Hieb said Monday. “So we look at: do we have the staff, and how many beds would we be able to staff in order to take care of those patients?”
She says physical bed space is only part of the equation and says staffing concerns are also straining healthcare resources. COVID-19 splits those ICU resources, too.
“With your COVID ICU, you have an isolation area,” said Hieb “So typically we have a team who [just] works in that isolation area.”
Hieb says the current surge, which experts attribute to the delta variant of the virus, has Bellin Hospital’s COVID ICU at around half of the patients it saw during the peak of last year’s outbreak.
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