NM again declares crisis standards of care

[struggle4progress]

Algernon D'Ammassa
Las Cruces Sun-News

New Mexico has, for the second time since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, formally enacted crisis standards of care for the state's hospital network, owing to a lack of resources sufficient to meet the demand for care.

The announcement from the state Department of Health Monday came in the midst of a six-week plateau in cases, following a increase in cases over the summer driven by the highly contagious delta variant. Officials said hospitals have been struggling at times to find beds in the statewide network for patients in need of higher levels of care ...

Under crisis standards of care, medical facilities may use a standardized procedure for deciding how to allocate resources that have been stretched beyond their capacity to care for everyone — particularly the costliest decisions about how to allocate what is available and to whom ...

The larger load of non-COVID patients was attributed in part to patients delaying care earlier in the pandemic, as well as the impacts of an exhausted healthcare workforce facing a public health crisis that Scrase said was largely preventable ...

https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/local/new-mexico/2021/10/18/new-mexico-enacts-crisis-standards-care-hospitals-strained-covid-19/8513072002/

[struggle4progress]

1. Oregon Health Authority punts question: how to ration care?

Amelia Templeton of Oregon Public Broadcasting

... “The delta variant, tragically, has brought us to the place we feared last year,” they wrote on Aug. 30, 2021. “With capacity stretched to the breaking point, hospitals are being forced to make triage decisions. We strongly believe that ‘no plan’ is the worst sort of plan, often defaulting to a first-come/first-served approach that will only exacerbate already existing societal inequities.”

The group that sent the .. email was made up of medical ethics experts, emergency room doctors, and critical care physicians ...

A year before, many of members of that group had been part of an effort to rewrite Oregon’s flawed crisis care triage guidelines ...

“We all are served by having clear objective guidelines. No clinician wants to be the person who decides who lives and dies.”

https://www.thelundreport.org/content/oregon-health-authority-punts-question-how-ration-care-crisis