Raimondo Announces Construction of 3 Temporary Hospitals — “We Do Not Have Enough Hospital Beds”
Friday, April 03, 2020
Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo announced Friday the construction of three temporary hospitals at the Rhode Island Convention Center, the former Citizens Bank complex in Cranston and the vacant Lowe’s store at Quonset in North Kingstown.
"We don't have enough hospital beds, doctors or nurses," Raimondo warned.
Raimondo made a plea for retired healthcare professionals -- doctors, nurses and other licensed professionals -- to assist in meeting the expected surge.
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The Rhode Island National Guard and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are presently planning and building these three temporary hospitals that are expected to provide more than 1,000 additional beds.
As GoLocal reported earlier in the week, the National Guard has been onsite inspecting the facility.
The three facilities will operate similarly to how New York has built out the Jacob Javits Convention Center -- 1,500-bed temporary hospital.
As GoLocal reported Tuesday, that the WSJ reported, "A March 28 email from Robert Femia, who heads the New York health center’s department of emergency medicine, underscored the life-or-death decisions placed on the shoulders of bedside physicians as they treat increasing numbers of coronavirus patients with a limited supply of ventilators."
“'For those patients who you feel intubation will not change their ultimate clinical outcome (for example cardiac arrests, some chronic disease patients at end of life, etc) you will have support in your decision making at the department and institutional level to withhold futile intubations,' he wrote, referring to the tubes attached to ventilators that are inserted in the mouths of patients and sit above the lungs."
New York Email
Last Friday GoLocal LIVE, former Rhode Island Health Director Dr. Michael Fine read the following email he received from a friend and colleague in New York -- it paints a heartbreaking picture of the challenges healthcare workers are facing battling coronavirus.
The email to Fine was from Dr. Alan R. Roth, Chairman, Department of Family Medicine, Ambulatory Care and Community Medicine and Chief, Department of Pain and Palliative Care Medicine at MediSys Health Network -- Flushing Hospital Medical Center/Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. He wrote:
Never in my life could I have imagined what we are all going through, people are dying, residents and faculty are getting very sick and fortunately so far no deaths of staff, yet..........
No one is helping us, lack of PPE, lack of being able to isolate is what made many sick early,
Our country and healthcare system have failed NY, we are on our own
I have been working 20 hour days and need to keep the face of strength or my department will collapse
I have not had a day off in a month
