Valley counties ease policy limiting ambulance transport to hospitals. Here’s why
The strain on hospital emergency rooms from coronavirus patients and other seriously ill or injured people over the past two months has eased somewhat over the past few weeks.
That’s enough, Fresno County health officials said Friday, to lift a policy that limited ambulance crews and emergency medical technicians to transporting only true “emergency” patients to emergency rooms for the past two months.
Dan Lynch, emergency medical services director for Fresno County, said the “assess-and-refer” policy was put in place Aug. 11 as hospitals in Fresno, Kings, Madera and Merced counties reported an increasing burden on their emergency departments, to the point where they had few, if any, places to put new patients arriving by ambulance. The result was increasing the time ambulance crews were waiting to get their patients into the hospital. That effectively tied up the crews and their vehicles and increasing the waiting time for people calling for an ambulance.
Over the past two months, ambulance crews responding to a call were required to assess the patient and determine if their case was an actual medical emergency requiring immediate transport to a hospital. If not, the patient was referred to call their regular doctor or visit an urgent-care clinic.
“We decided it was time to pull back on that,” Lynch said Friday. “A lot of that had to do with the fact that hospitals are managing better in their emergency departments.”
But those emergency rooms, he added, “are still very busy” with patients coming in with COVID-19 and other serious conditions.
In early July, fewer than 50 people were hospitalized in Fresno County for inpatient treatment of coronavirus cases. By Aug. 11, when the assess-and-refer policy was implemented, that had grown to 260 hospitalized coronavirus patients. The COVID-19 hospital burden peaked in Fresno County in early September at more than 400 patients.
Over the past few weeks, the hospital numbers have slowly drifted back down, to 240 on Thursday. But that’s still almost five times as many hospitalized COVID-19 patients as before the mid- and late-summer surge.
“The hospitals are still very busy, but they’re managing,” Lynch said. “It feels like someone has turned down the pressure cooker. They’re still dealing with full (intensive-care unit) beds, they’re still holding some ICU patients in their emergency departments.”
“It’s wonderful to see that drop” from more than 400 patients to 240, he added. “But it’s not seeming to drop quick enough.”
Compared with more populous and urbanized regions of California, “the Central Valley is a hotbed for hospitalized patients,” Lynch said, noting that outside aid in the form of medical staffing from the National Guard and other sources remains in place at some Valley hospitals to provide relief to overwhelmed nurses and technicians.
This story was originally published October 15, 2021 at 4:23 PM.
