Kansas City emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Hospitals ask some patients to stay away

As COVID-19 grips the metro, Kansas City area hospitals are so full, they’re asking people not to go to the emergency room unless they have a true emergency.

Wait times are stretching into the hours and staffs are overwhelmed, said Steve Hoeger, co-chair of the Mid-America Regional Council’s Health Care Coalition.

He urged people to call their primary care physician or go to an urgent care with minor needs and save the ERs for more serious problems, such as heart attacks and strokes.

“Hospitals are seeing unprecedented volume right now,” said Hoeger. “They’re busy with a lot of really sick people that are staying longer and tying up our bed capacity, and that puts added strain on our emergency departments.”

Some people use emergency departments as their primary care provider, which is never a good practice, said Hoeger.

“But when we’re so busy, that just makes the situation that much worse. So we would ask people to use the emergency department for true emergencies, somebody having a heart attack, somebody having a stroke, … significant car wrecks.

“It’s not necessarily ‘I was out playing Frisbee at the park and I twisted my ankle and is it sprained? Is it broke? Well, let me go to the emergency department.’”

Go to urgent care

When local emergency departments get busy they switch into “high volume” status, which alerts ambulance services that patients face a delay of care so they can choose a less-busy hospital and be seen quicker.

But when 12 metro hospitals hit that high volume status for the first time last month, that option was shut down “because now everyone’s in the same boat,” Hoeger said.

That option has been unavailable to patients nearly every weekday for weeks, he said.

Urgent cares are an option for people with more minor situations who want to be seen quickly, Hoeger said.

“Otherwise … people come here and they’re very frustrated that they hate to wait four, six, eight, 10 hours to be seen for that twisted ankle. And then they take it out on our staff that already are very tired themselves,” he said.

“So we would ask, if you come, be nice to our staff. But No. 1, make a good decision on what’s the most appropriate place to seek care right now. We’ve seen stuff as silly as lint in the navel. And they’ve come in by ambulance with that.”

Many local emergency departments are also having to board patients who need to be hospitalized because in-patient beds are full, Hoeger said.

COVID hospitalizations rising

Those aren’t all COVID patients being admitted. Some are people with chronic health conditions who didn’t get medical treatment when the pandemic hit and hospitals canceled procedures and surgeries. Some patients also stayed away from doctors and hospitals for fear of catching COVID, and now their health has worsened.

“COVID is not the only player. We have a lot of other really sick people in the hospital,” said Hoeger. “But COVID’s becoming more and more of a player in this. Right now, at Truman, we have more COVID patients than we’ve seen since early January. Our peak was in December. And that number just continues to go up a little bit every day.”

On Monday morning, for example, Truman Medical Center had 54 COVID patients, up from the mid-40s the previous week.

Local hospitals don’t want to get to the point where they can’t give care to patients, whether it’s COVID or not, because there aren’t enough beds available.

Kansas City hospitals have been admitting significantly more COVID patients over the last couple of weeks, with some, including Saint Luke’s Health System, doubling the number from June to July. Several hospitals haven’t seen numbers this high since the last wave of infections at the beginning of the year.

Hospitals officials say the majority of new COVID patients are younger, sicker and not vaccinated.

The loud, growing plea from hospital officials across the metro: Get vaccinated.