Vermont’s coronavirus cases are trending down, but hospitals in the state continue to grapple with critical staffing shortages, federal data shows.
As of Monday, most of Vermont’s hospitals — 10 out of 17 facilities — reported that they did not have enough staff for normal operations, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Eleven hospitals in the state are anticipating critical staffing shortages in the coming week.
The staffing shortage persists even as hospitals continue to hire expensive temporary staff to fill in the gaps.
Almost 60% of Vermont’s hospitals reported serious staffing issues — the highest number in New England, federal data showed. The percentage of hospitals reporting critical staffing shortages in most states is in the low single digits, though some states lack data from a significant number of hospitals. In Pennsylvania, for example, almost 70% of hospitals did not submit a report to federal regulators Monday.
However, the diminutive size of Vermont’s health care system may artificially inflate those figures.
Vermont’s health care workforce woes predated the Covid-19 pandemic, but the past few years compounded the crisis. The continued workforce decline has serious consequences for patients: Short-staffed hospitals have been forced to cancel or delay surgeries. People sick enough to be admitted have been stuck at emergency rooms for lack of staffed inpatient beds. And the patients that occupy hospital beds are at higher risk of complications and even death because of medical errors.
Eight of Vermont’s nonprofit hospitals have fewer than 25 beds apiece. In these facilities, even one or two staff absences could disrupt care. These smaller hospitals often cannot afford the steep cost of temporary staff, so it’s much harder to fill vacancies there.
The critical staff shortage reflected in Monday’s federal data persists even as health leaders deployed workers from the National Guard and helped hospitals reopen beds by paying for temporary staff. Some hospitals have bolstered their workforce with temporary clinical staff from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
[Looking for data on breakthrough cases? See our reporting on the latest available statistics.]
Vermont reported 263 new Covid cases Friday, according to the most recently available data from the Department of Health. Of those, 57 are hospitalized, including 12 patients in intensive care. The state reported more than 1,800 daily cases at the peak in early January.
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