Hospital feels the rush during the fires
All hands on deck at Tioga Medical Clinic
James C. Falcon
Williston Herald
Tioga firefighter Jon Moberg receives oxygen while Cindy Hatch, a member of the Tioga EMS, and firefighter Joel Schaffett look on. Crews from Tioga were on hand to help locally with the fires while crews from outside facilities were on standby at the Tioga Medical Center. (Photo provided by Shelby Davis)
A typical Saturday night at the Tioga Medical Center turned out to be a whole lot more last weekend.
Typically, on weekends, the hospital’s ER is used for urgent care when other resources aren’t available, explained CEO Jamie Eraas. There are usually two or three patients there on a Saturday night. Last Saturday night (Oct. 5), however, that number reached six. While that doesn’t sound like an extremely high number, it was a stress to the clinic in the wake of another added stress felt by the entire city, as well as the region: Wildfires were burning all around.
While listening to the pages for ambulance crews, the hospital expected a high number of patients. However, depending on where the patients were coming from, some did come to Tioga while others went to Williston. It all depended on which side of the fire they were located.
The hospital’s patient census included those suffering from smoke inhalation, burns, and those who sustained injuries in car and motorcycle accidents on Highway 2, people who were trying to navigate the highway in the smoke and fire and instead hit other vehicles head on, Eraas said. As of Monday afternoon, none of the fire-related patients were there at the hospital; they were either released or transferred to another facility.
“We’re the typical small town,” Eraas said. “When word gets out that we had many patients coming in, our staff started to flood in the door and step in wherever they need. Multiple departments were here assisting with patients and residents, stepping in wherever they could to help.”
“It’s been overwhelming, the amount of support and collaboration between internal staff as well as outside agencies, people in the community,” added Shelby Davis, Chief Operating Officer at the hospital. “Our ER staff is typically three on the weekend and one provider. At this time, we had over 25 employees that were here staffing.” That included ER staff, maintenance, dietary, administration, “people coming in from Long Term Care over to help.”
Located in the northeast part of the city, the Tioga Medical Center had an emergency room with inpatients, a 30-bed skilled nursing facility (28 of those beds were occupied), and an independent living facility attached to it. Should an evacuation have taken place, it would have been possible, Eraas said, noting that employees flooded into the facility to be on hand. Thankfully, an evacuation was not called.
“Then we were standing by, if the winds were to turn and we needed to evacuate, we were standing by, prepared to do that,” Eraas added.
In addition to the internal effort, Eraas noted that “an immense amount of support” from other facilities also played a big part.
“We had CEOs from neighboring facilities calling, saying ‘What do you need from us? What can we do to help?'” Eraas said. “That was just an ease in the back of our mind knowing that we had that back-up support if it was needed.”
Ambulance crews were then en route to Tioga to sit on standby in the event that patients needed to be transported out.
“We don’t normally have that,” Eraas said. “Usually, we’re fighting for crews to get our patients out.”
That help “took a huge load off of the ambulance crews out on scene,” Davis said, adding that at one point, it looked as though Tioga lost an ambulance after it went into a ditch. (It was towed out and was back in commission.) “At that point, we didn’t know if we were down a rig, so having those crews come in and be able to take care of those critical patients took a big load off of our volunteer services.”
Davis, who also serves as a volunteer EMT, was part of a crew staged south of Tioga along Highway 2, treating firefighters as they were coming back and forth. Other nurses who are also volunteer EMS were on other ambulance rigs, responding to calls and bringing in patients, she added.
For Eraas, as well as the staff at Tioga Medical Center, it was an immense relief knowing there was a line of ambulances outside in the parking lot “so we could care for our community and focus on them,” Eraas said. That collaboration between the facilities and internally, she added, “is something that we’ll walk away with and has made an impression on us for the years to come.”