COVID surge causes delays for ambulances
Crews face ‘astronomically’ long wait times at overwhelmed ERs
In a sweltering shopping center parking lot off Interstate 45 Thursday morning, Houston Fire Department paramedic Josh Walls tried to find a hospital to take his patient.
“Negative,” came the reply on the radio. “All of TMC is on divert.”
The six hospitals in the Texas Medical Center with emergency departments were asking ambulances to take patients elsewhere because they were at capacity.
The patient, a 29-year-old construction worker with chest pain, asked to be taken to Northwest Houston Hospital. The dispatcher said it, too, was on divert status. Walls and his partner Valentin “Beau” Beauliere took him there anyway.
As local hospitals are strained with people ill with COVID-19, ambulance crews face long delays in emergency departments to deliver patients. Houston Fire Department medics have waited an average of 29 minutes at ERs in August, longer than in any
month of the pandemic, according to department logs. The average wait time was 16 minutes in 2019.
“The waits are astronomically longer,” Walls said. “We let the patients know what to expect; some change their minds when they realize they’re going to be in an ER for 12 hours with COVID patients.”
The lag affects not just patients exhibiting COVID symptoms, but those with a variety of maladies, including heart attacks, strokes, allergic reactions and broken bones. It extends the time ambulances are out of service, forcing other crews to respond to calls outside their normal territories.
And the delays may get even worse. The Houston region on Tuesday set an all-time record for COVID-19 hospitalizations, with more than 4,000. In those 25 counties, 747 patients were stuck in emergency departments waiting for an open general or ICU bed, according to the Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council.
Houston Fire Chief Sam Peña said the number of ambulance transports has increased 25 percent during this surge. He urged residents to get vaccinated, which research has shown greatly decreases the likelihood that a COVID-19 case will require hospitalization.
“A 10-, 15-, 20-minute delay for us to transfer our patients from the ambulance to the ERs has a domino effect on the system, and our ability to service the next emergency call,” Peña said. “This issue is not just affecting those sick or symptomatic with coronavirus; it’s affecting all our patients and calls for service.”
Austin-Travis County EMS also reported a longer ER wait time of 30 minutes this month compared to 26 minutes in 2019. The Dallas and San Antonio fire departments did not immediately provide their wait times.
At Northwest Houston Hospital on Thursday morning, Walls and Beauliere were able to admit the construction worker in about 20 minutes. A nurse took the man’s vital signs in a hallway and then dropped him off in the lobby, crowded with masked patients, until a doctor could see him.
The ambulance crew had caught a break — Walls recounted having several hours-long waits at hospitals in recent weeks — but the fact that a call had taken them outside of city limits showed how strained the department is by this latest COVID-19 wave.
Walls and Beauliere are assigned to Station 17 in the East End, one of 94 in the Houston Fire Department. They already had responded to a call by Hobby Airport that morning.
“We shouldn’t be making calls this far out,” Beauliere said. “We’re being stretched beyond our territory.”
Over the next few hours, the pair responded to a car wreck on I-10, a nursing home in Midtown and a man with heart trouble in Spring Branch.
As dusk fell, they were dispatched to a possible stroke at an apartment complex by NRG Stadium. Firefighters already on scene helped Walls and Beauliere transport the 86-year-old woman to the back of the ambulance.
Her distraught daughter asked where her mother would be taken; she had read that Houston hospitals were full. Beauliere took the woman’s blood pressure and administered an electrocardiogram; all appeared normal. He coaxed the woman to drink water and eat a few bites of bread. After a few minutes, she said she felt better and did not need to be taken to the hospital.
The Texas Medical Center hospitals, less than two miles north, remained on divert status. The medics would not have been able to offer a reliable estimate about how long the woman would wait for care.
“Sometimes that’s not bad,” Walls said. “Sometimes it’s pandemonium, and you’re waiting on the wall for two hours.”