PA Establishes Triage Care Guidelines For Overwhelmed Hospitals

PENNSYLVANIA — Pennsylvania has announced new standards of triage care meant to guide hospitals in case they become overwhelmed by critical coronavirus patients.

The Interim Pennsylvania Crisis Standards of Care for Pandemic Guidelines, put forward by the Department of Health, aims to help hospitals determine how best to allocate thinning resources when the needs of the patient community exceed what is available.

Stay up-to-date on coronavirus developments in Pennsylvania — sign up for Patch news alerts.

Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine called it preparation for a "worst case scenario" and was hopeful that the standards would need to be put into place in Pennsylvania should social distancing measures continue to be followed.

"As we have seen in Italy and New York, the rapid spread of COVID-19 can quickly overwhelm the health care system,” Dr. Levine said. “We hope that our hospitals never have to use crisis standards of care to make treatment decisions."

The Department of Health was already four months into working on this document when the coronavirus outbreak began. They had initially planned the document as an emergency measure to handle overwhelming patient intake in case of a major natural disaster, modeling their response on how hospitals handled some of the major hurricanes and earthquakes around the world.

"When COVID-19 became a global pandemic, it was fast-tracked," Dr. Levine said of the standards.

Specifically, the document notes procedures for a variety of scenarios, including equipment and supply shortages, insufficient number of trained staff, severe delays in hospital care, and more.

Strategies laid out to handle a "medical surge" such as coronavirus are stockpiling the most crucial supplies, delaying care for less urgent cases, discharging patients who are not critically ill, and in certain cases denying treatment to those less serious cases. All of this is in an effort to save the lives of those most critically ill.

It should be noted that in Pennsylvania, hospitals are not yet at the point of being overwhelmed. According to a hospital preparedness database recently launched by the state, there are currently, 2,391 patients hospitalized with coronavirus in Pennsylvania. A total of 661 of them are on ventilators.

There are still 1,753 adult ICU beds, 7,948 regular beds, and 101 pediatric ICU beds available in the state, as of Wednesday afternoon.

The entire interim guidelines can be viewed online here.

>>>Full coverage of coronavirus in Pennsylvania