DETROIT — Krysti Kallek has worked for the past decade in the emergency department at Detroit’s Sinai Grace Hospital. But she’s never experienced anything like Michigan’s coronavirus crisis.
The number of patients. The severity of their symptoms.
The emergency department is bursting to the seams, day after day, night after night.
“We’ve run out of stretchers. We’ve run out of body bags,” said Kallek, who is a nurse.
Patients end up in the emergency-department hallways using oxygen tanks, she said. One night, they even ran out oxygen tanks, so staff ran oxygen tubing from patient rooms to the people in the hallways.
And the COVID patients who come in are so, so fragile.
“We’ve never had patients like this, who crash so fast out of nowhere,” Kallek said. “One minute they’re smiling and the next minute they’re down.”
And when the patients are put on ventilators, which many are, it’s hard to keep them calm and sedated, she said. “So you have to put them on multiple drips, which brings down their blood pressure and you have to monitor that, and they’re still waking up and having things happen out of nowhere.”
The situation is so fraught that emergency-departments nurse are afraid to take a meal break because that leaves even fewer nurses to monitor so many patients, she said. “I couldn’t tell you the last time I took a break.”
To make matters worse, the fact that coronavirus is highly contagious means patients can’t have family with them, and the medical staff has to worry about being infected themselves. Kallek said a colleague who has coronavirus is now on a ventilator struggling for his life.
It’s in this environment, she said, that she and other nurses on the night shift staged a walkout Sunday. When the shift began, there were six nurses, including one still in training, expected to care for 68 patients already there — not counting those likely to arrive during the night.
“We needed to do something drastic to get people’s attention,” Kallek said, adding the nurses who walked out had the full support of day-shift nurses who agreed to stay on to care for patients.
The biggest complaint: understaffing, which Kallek says has been a long-time issue at Sinai-Grace, whose clientele tends to be disproportionately low-income and more likely to have underlying health issues such as asthma and diabetes.
“High patient volume is creating an increased need for staffing, especially nurses,” said a statement provided to MLive by Detroit Medical Center, which operates Sinai Grace. “The DMC is using a variety of resources to help to supplement nursing staff.“
Kallek says Detroit Medical Center, which operates Sinai-Grace, should increase incentive pay and do whatever it takes to increase permanent, adequately trained staff, especially in a crisis that has pushed Sinai-Grace to a breaking point.
“It’s been like this for the past two, three weeks,” Kallek said. “And once it started, it has not stopped.”
Unrest around the state
Kallek is far from the only Michigan health-care workers anxious and upset these days.
Across the state, there are concerns about staffing. Worries about shortages of personal protective equipment. Fears about their own health.
Doctors on front lines of coronavirus: ‘It seems like the sky is falling’
At least three Michigan healthcare workers have died from coronavirus.
Officials at the Beaumont Health in metro Detroit said on Monday that 1,500 of its 38,000 workers, including 500 nurses, were out sick with COVID symptoms. The Henry Ford Health System said about 600 to 700 of their 31,000 workers have tested positive. At University of Michigan’s Michigan Medicine, 110 workers out 728 tested positive for the coronavirus. Two-thirds of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 in Bay County are health care workers, according to the Bay County Health Department.
In Detroit, there was the walkout at Sinai Grace. In Kalamazoo, nurses at Borgess Medical Center are alarmed by the specter of temporary job transfers to the east side of the state. In Mount Pleasant and Lapeer, McLaren hospitals are being criticized by the Michigan Nurses Association for not doing enough to protect and support employees.
“If we don’t take care of our nurses, who will be left to take care of COVID-19 patients?” said Christie Serniak, a nurse who is a local union president at McLaren Central Michigan Hospital in Mount Pleasant.
Hospital officials say they are doing the best they can in an unprecedented crisis.
“Our team members are our greatest asset and their health and safety is a top priority,” said a statement from Henry Ford Health System.
A McLaren spokeswoman said her hospital system is working with the nurses’ union to address their concerns, and officials are “moving quickly to address the fluidity of this crisis to keep patients and staff safe.”
Nonetheless, there are ongoing issues with staffing levels, access to coronavirus testing for staff and a shortage of personal protective equipment, or PPEs, such as masks and gowns, acknowledged Ruthann Sudderth, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Health and Hospital Association.
“We’ve been laser-focused” on getting more PPEs in the midst of a nationwide shortage, Sudderth said. “Hospitals are doing everything they can and using all of their purchasing power to get more supplies.”
There also is a shortage of coronavirus tests and test supplies such as throat swabs and reagents used in the testing, she said. While testing of sympto