The Fanny Allen operating rooms will be closed because more nurses have reported feeling nauseated and dizzy.
Ten staff members at the Colchester facility said they felt sick in the last 10 days, less than two weeks after nurses on the two rehab floors reported similar symptoms.
After a year of repeated instances of staff members feeling sick, hospital officials promised Thursday that nurses won’t return to the rehab units or the operating rooms until investigators figure out what’s causing the issues.
“We feel like we’ve explored everything that we can check to make it as safe as possible — we’ve used multiple outside experts, and we continue to monitor the air quality and other issues,” said UVM Medical Center President Steve Leffler. “Unless we find something that we’re certain is the cause, we won’t go back.”
Surgeries will move to the main campus in Burlington on Nov. 17. Leffler said hospital officials are looking into mobile operating rooms in the near term and are also considering an application for an emergency permit to build or buy another building to replace Fanny Allen.
Fanny Allen operating room nurses first reported a strange odor and feelings of nausea in October 2019. After a second bout in November, the hospital closed the Fanny Allen operating rooms for two months to investigate.
Some staff members had elevated carbon-dioxide levels and investigators suggested that the exhaust from an idling truck outside had been sucked into the building through the ventilation system.
In April and May, though, 14 staff members in a separate rehab unit went to urgent care feeling ill. Some felt nauseated and dizzy. One staff member’s arms turned purple, employees said at the time.
UVM closed the rehab unit so that state and internal investigators could run a series of tests. The results were inconclusive, but a Department of Health report attributed at least some of symptoms to the cleaning materials that staff members were using during Covid.
Nurses and patients moved back to Fanny Allen in early October. Two weeks later, some got sick again, and on Halloween night, the hospital moved 14 rehab patients and all of the staff to the main campus.
In each of the previous incidents, Leffler and other hospital officials had said air quality problems in the rehab unit were different from those in the operating rooms.
“At this time, I don’t think we know the cause,” Leffler said. Hospital officials will review air quality data, and an occupational health expert planned to interview affected nurses, Leffler said. Other experts won’t be brought in unless new information is uncovered, he said.
The Vermont Occupational Safety and Health Administration is not investigating, according to Dawn Lebaron, vice president of hospital services.
Fanny Allen typically conducts between five and 30 surgeries a day. Leffler said the UVM hospital can perform the operations in the evening or on weekends. Outsourcing patients to other hospitals in the UVM Health Network is another option.
Urgent care and outpatient physical therapy departments, where no one has gotten sick, will continue to operate at Fanny Allen.
The transition has been challenging for staff, said Deb Snell, president of the nurses union. “People who work at Fanny Allen wanted to work at Fanny Allen. They’re leaving home,” she said. “We all wish this hadn’t happened, but it has, so we kind of have to go with it.”
“I feel bad for our members, I feel really bad for our patients, but we have to do whatever we need to do to keep them safe,” Snell said.
