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Gov. Andrew Cuomo said this week that the state’s Department of Health has instructed hospitals to implement the “surge and flex” plan, which includes the expansion of bed capacity by 25 percent and preparing to balance the potential load of patients within hospital systems.
According to Cuomo, the state has 54,000 hospital beds, and if they increase capacity to the max, can reach 75,000. Currently, there are approximately 35,000 beds currently occupied, and 4,600 COVID-19 patients in New York hospitals.
As part of the plan, Cuomo has also called on retired nurses and doctors to join frontline workers to reduce the stress on hospital employees who have been taxed over the past nine months.
“We've done a couple of things that are different than other states,” Cuomo said during a recent COVID-19 briefing. “In New York, the state sets all the policies and keeps numbers that are determinative of the policies.
“Now, we close down if you hit critical hospital capacity. We're implementing the surge and flex,” he added. “We're going to add 25 percent additional hospital beds. We'll renew the registration for nurses and doctors to get us a backup staff pool, continue to caution on the small spread.”
Cuomo said that as a last resort, they could also add at least 5,000 field hospital beds similar to the 2,000-bed hospital at the Javitz Center and Westchester County Center.
“We are well aware of staff resources, and these staffs are coming into this stress,” he added. “It looks like a field hospital in the Army … just an ocean of cots, and I hope we never get to that point.”
Unlike in the spring, Cuomo said that hospitals will be tasked with distributing their patient loads within their system so that no one hospital gets overwhelmed.
“Let’s get one thing straight, in the spring, the hospital system was not overwhelmed, individual hospitals got overwhelmed because the individual hospitals did not have the capacity to balance patients, and that was an education to me,” Cuomo added.
“You have a public hospital system with 10 hospitals, and one hospital gets overwhelmed, you have to have the capacity to balance those patients among the other nine hospitals,” he continued. “If someone walks into a hospital that was overburdened, they should say ‘hold on, we’re going to drive you to our sister hospital 10 minutes away that has less volume.’”
Cuomo made note that New York’s public and private hospital systems are also working together in an unprecedented partnership.
“This has never been done before, and it has been highly disruptive,” Cuomo said about combating COVID-19. “We saw what happened when we started (the surge and flex plan) in the spring, and it went fine and this time we have even more experience with it, so we’ll be more prepared.”
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