PROVIDENCE – The field hospital at the R.I. Convention Center is set to admit its first COVID-19 patient on Dec. 1.
Cathy Duquette, executive vice president for quality and safety and chief nursing executive at Lifespan Corp., which operates the surge hospital, said the facility is supplied for up to 600 patients, and will have the staffing capacity to admit the first 100 patients this week.
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The facility is designed to hold coronavirus patients who need medical care, but not those who need intensive care.
As hospitals across Rhode Island, and the nation, fill and — in some cases — overrun their systems with coronavirus patients, transferring patients out of general care facilities will allow elective surgeries to continue.
Lifespan had assembled the convention center in the early months of the pandemic, but when COVID-19 cases declined in the summer, the health system did not need to ever open it. The facility is decked with dimming light features for patients to know when its nighttime, and is complete with oxygen, medical supplies, an ambulance and a retail pharmacy, said Duquette.
The facility was set to be disassembled earlier this fall, but the state decided to keep it open because of the recent surge of cases in the last month.
“We created this from scratch. We’ve designed this with safety in mind,” said Dr. Selim Sunar, the director of disaster medicine and emergency preparedness at Rhode Island Hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine, which is owned by Lifespan. Sunar is expected to run the field hospital. “We were very proud of our work designing this. We were happy that it wasn’t necessary.”
The Cranston field hospital site, which is managed by Care New England Health System, began admitting patients Monday afternoon, which was the first time the site had seen a patient since the beginning of the pandemic.
Dr. Laura Forman, chief of emergency medicine at Kent County Memorial Hospital, is in charge of the Cranston site. She told the Providence Business News recently that the staffing ratio inside the field hospital will be different than inside Care New England’s hospitals. Each nurse there is expected to be in charge of at least 25 patients, and each physician in charge of at least 50 COVID-19 patients.
As previously reported, the health system will use SkillsRI and volunteers already employed with Care New England to staff the Cranston site.
Duquette said staffing ratios at the convention center will be similar to Lifespan’s hospitals. She said if the demand for hospitals increases, then Lifespan will reach out to staffing agencies for additional medical staff. She said that the system has contracted for agency nurses for the last several years.
“We need to keep our staffing standards,” said Duquette.
Alexa Gagosz is a PBN staff writer. Contact her at Gagosz@PBN.com. You may also follow her on Twitter at @AlexaGagosz.
