Bay Area hospitals accepting transfer patients with medical facilities overwhelmed

The latest COVID surge has sparked a new level of cooperation amongst hospitals in the region. Medical facilities are sharing everything from advice to equipment. 

As ICU beds filled up in Santa Clara County, other facilities like Stanford Medical Center stepped up to help.

Since November, hospitals have taken 607 transfer patients from other hospitals in need.
 
"When there are places where there's nowhere else left for ICU patients to go, finding a way to make that work here is kind of our job," said Dr. Ryan Ribeira, Assistant Medical Director of the Emergency Department at Stanford.
 
Some of the transfers were sick with COVID but many were not. By taking them on, Stanford was keeping smaller hospitals from being overwhelmed.
 
"Sometimes we flirt with getting to that capacity too but thus far we haven't. And we've been very, very lucky. And we have our new facility and we're still using our other facility so that came along just in the nick of time," said Andra Blomkalns, Chair of Emergency Medicine at Stanford.
 
All the region's hospitals are taking collaboration and cooperation to a new level. They've arranged a daily call designed to cut through red tape.
Doctors at O'Connor Hospital in San Jose said it's been invaluable.
 
"And while the initial goal of our group was to kind of balance the impact of the surge across the county, it quickly grew to much more than that," said Meenesh Mhimani, hospital executive at O'Connor Hospital.
 
It became a chance to share best practices and identify challenges like who needed help with patients, equipment, and supplies.
 
"The beauty in it is its simplicity and its speed in terms of being able to happen. Because if that hospital is running out of resources, there is no time to waste," said Blomkalns.
 
And they recognize that a hospital that needs help one day, may be offering it the next. So doctors have been digging deep and are ready to take on even more.
 
"This probably is the most important time in our lives and those patients' lives that we put those things, put everything else aside, and just take care of people," said Blomkalns.
 
The hospitals expect things to be difficult for the next couple of months. But they're hopeful the collaboration will continue even after the pandemic.