BOSTON (WHDH) - Members of the Massachusetts National Guard began deploying to hospitals and ambulance services Monday to help with a staffing shortage amid the latest COVID-19 surge.
Gov. Charlie Baker activated up to 500 National Guard members to support hospitals for up to 90 days by providing transportation between facilities, observing patients that pose a risk to themselves, offering security, moving patients around inside hospitals, and providing food service.
“There’s no question the next few weeks will be enormously difficult for our health care community,” Baker said last week. “There’s staff shortages, sicker patients and fewer stepdown beds available.”
The National Guard is set to support 55 acute care hospitals and 12 ambulance service providers.
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“What we’re trying to do is to give the health care facilities enough time to hire appropriate personnel and train those people,” Mass. National Guard Ltc. Patrick Donnelly said. “We’re there to bridge the gap.”
Also starting Monday, hospitals with less than 15 percent of their staffed medical-surgical and intensive care unit bed capacity available must postpone or cancel non-essential, non-urgent scheduled procedures likely to result in inpatient admission to comply with a new Department of Public Health order.
Marylou Sudders, state Secretary of Health and Human Services, said last week that “I want to be clear, our hospitals are ready to care for the urgent needs of the residents of the Commonwealth.”
Individual specialty hospitals are exempt from the order.
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