A view of University Medical Center Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2014. The Las Vegas Medical District comprises acreage around UMC and Valley Hospital and another area near Martin Luther King Boulevard and Symphony Park.
Friday, Jan. 21, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Nevada is the third-least prepared state in the country to respond to spiking hospitalizations as COVID-19 continues to surge, according to a new report.
Analysts at the online insurance comparison marketplace QuoteWizard by Lending Tree ranked Nevada third-worst, tied with New Mexico, on how prepared it is to meet patient capacity.
The study looked at each state’s number of intensive care unit beds, staffing shortages, number of physicians and ICU beds in use.
In Nevada, according to QuoteWizard’s report released this week, there are 2.37 ICU beds and two physicians per 1,000 people. At the time of the report, 86% of ICU beds in the state were in use, and 25% of Nevada’s hospitals were facing self-reported “critical” staffing shortages.
The report analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Kaiser Family Foundation.
By comparison, the best-ranked state according to the study, New York, had 2.35 ICU beds but 4.6 doctors per 1,000 residents and an ICU utilization of 77%. Nine percent of hospitals there reported a critical staffing shortage.
Only Georgia and Texas ranked lower overall than Nevada.
Nevada’s physician-to-resident ratio is the second-lowest in the nation, which is a problem that preceded the pandemic and why Las Vegas leaders worked to launch the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV in 2017.
While Nevada needs more doctors in the long run, it more urgently needs residents to get vaccinated against the coronavirus to reduce the likelihood of severe illness requiring hospitalization, said Nick VinZant, a senior research analyst for QuoteWizard.
Attracting and training doctors is “not a relatively quick fix, whereas getting a vaccine appointment is much more of an easy way to go about it,” he said.
According to the state health department, Nevada had 1,852 people in the hospital — 320 in intensive care — with confirmed or likely COVID cases as of Wednesday. Most of those patients were in Clark County, Nevada’s most populous county.
The Nevada Hospital Association extended its “crisis” declaration for a third consecutive week and noted that hospitals in Clark County, including Las Vegas, formally requested staffing assistance from the state.
“COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to increase in both Washoe and Clark counties,” the association said in a weekly report that said an unspecified number of hospital positions are unstaffed daily because employees were calling in sick or isolating after coming in contact with someone who has COVID-19.
Last week, the association said patient care was dependent on “overtime, team nursing and other mitigation steps” that were “not sustainable.” It launched a campaign to tell people seeking coronavirus tests not to go to emergency rooms.
It hasn’t gotten better as hospitals here are 98% full with patients of all kinds, the according to the hospital association.
Gov. Steve Sisolak is urging all nursing students in good standing to consider becoming a “nurse apprentice.” He also appealed to retired, out-of-state, international and student medical practitioners to volunteer for Nevada’s Battle Born Medical Corps.
Sisolak said as many as 250 nursing apprentices could be drawn from among the nearly 900 students in accredited nursing programs statewide into a program that the governor said would help them “maximize the skills they have learned and get hands-on opportunities in the field while supporting the health care system.”
“The state continues to work with all of our partners to leverage existing resources and break down barriers so Nevadans in need can access care,” Sisolak said.
There is no current timeline for assistance to arrive, the hospital association said.
“The challenge right now is sort of a perfect storm of inadequate staffing levels and then surges of patients and percentages of COVID patients showing up in the ICU compared to ... last year,” said Cassius Lockett, director of disease surveillance and control at the Southern Nevada Health District in Las Vegas.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
