Greenwood Leflore Hospital expects to begin vaccinating its workers next week who have direct exposure to patients with COVID-19.
Hospital officials say they have been told they will initially get 200 doses of the Moderna vaccine, with more doses to come each week afterward.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve the Moderna vaccine later this week for distribution. Developed in partnership with the National Institutes of Health, the Moderna vaccine would be the second to gain FDA approval to ward off the virus that has claimed more than 300,000 lives in the nation. Hospitals in Mississippi and around the U.S. began this week inoculating workers with the first approved vaccine, which was developed by Pfizer and the Germany company BioNTech.
Because early supplies of the vaccines are limited, they are being reserved first for health care workers and those who work or live in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.
The Greenwood hospital has been working out the details of its vaccination plan.
The departments first being targeted are those with the most exposure to COVID-19 patients: the hospital’s specially created COVID-19 unit, its regular intensive care unit and its emergency room. Employees are being prioritized, according to CEO Jason Studley, based on guidelines provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those at the top of the list are workers who are 65 or older and those who have underlying health problems. Although most people who become infected with the coronavirus suffer only minor symptoms and recover quickly, the elderly and those in poor health can suffer serious complications from the respiratory disease, including death.
Vaccinations are voluntary for hospital employees, Studley said. The employees are being asked to respond by Thursday whether they want to be vaccinated.
“We’ll promote it,” said Studley. “We’ll get physician champions, we’ll get other staff members who’ve taken it and begin to try to build up the awareness of the medication and the vaccine that they’ll be taking.”
Mississippi health officials have been alarmed by what they describe as a statewide shortage of intensive care beds as a result of the most recent surge in COVID-19 cases. Effective Tuesday, all of the state’s hospitals were prohibited from doing any elective surgeries that would require an overnight stay after the procedure. The ban is to last at least until Dec. 23.
The Greenwood hospital has rarely filled up its 14-bed COVID-19 unit. It had seven patients being treated there as of Tuesday morning. Nevertheless, Studley said, the ban on non-urgent surgeries was a reasonable blanket precaution to be implemented so as to reserve sufficient capacity throughout Mississippi for treating patients who become seriously ill.
“We’re trying to keep our ICU bed capacity as open as possible,” he said. “We may not be full up, but our sister hospitals in surrounding counties may be full up and need a place to go.”
The hospital is well-stocked with ventilators and personal protection equipment, but there is a growing concern over staffing needs. Studley said the hospital could use 15 more nurses and three additional respiratory therapists, but they are presently hard to come by.
Gloria Boyd, the hospital’s chief nursing officer, said there is a huge demand nationwide for so-called “travel nurses,” who take assignment at premium wages in hospitals that have short-term staffing needs. In just the last 30 days, the demand for travel nurses has increased by 44%, according to a national survey Boyd cited Tuesday during the monthly meeting of the hospital board. The average travel nurse makes $85 to $150 per hour, she said: “That makes it difficult for small rural hospitals to really get the top-notch ICU, ER and COVID nurses for any facility.”
The nursing staff at the hospital’s main complex, not counting clinics, presently consists of 163 full-time equivalents. Travel nurses fill 8% of the positions.
The coronavirus continues to impact the hospital’s finances as well.
In November, net patient revenues were down $411,000, or 5%, and operating income was down $454,000, or 30%. The hospital would have posted a $1.9 million loss if not for a cushion of coronavirus relief money on which it was able to draw. The hospital used $1.1 million of that grant funding last month, reducing its loss to just under $730,000, half of what it lost in November 2019.
For the first two months of its fiscal year, the hospital has used just over $2 million of the grant money it accumulated during the previous fiscal year, reducing its loss to $553,000. That compares to a loss of nearly $1.7 million for the same two-month period in 2019.
The hospital still has roughly $6.6 million left of the nearly $25 million it received in grant money, most of it from the federal government, to apply against future losses.
It also has a reserve of $16.5 million in advance payments on Medicare under a separate federal program. This second pot of money, though, is a loan that the hospital will have to start paying back next year, unless Congress changes the terms.
Discounting the impact of COVID-19, the Greenwood hospital showed in November a $1.2 million to $1.3 million improvement as a result of measures it took over the past year, according to Studley.
“That’s a tremendous turnaround over that period of time,” he said.
“Minus COVID, we’re doing a lot better.”
•Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
