Pella Regional Health Center leadership continues to meet as medical personnel navigate the challenges of treating COVID-19.

CEO Bob Kroese says an incident command team meets at least once a week to try and manage any potential impacts a surge of critically ill patients could have on their resources, and they provide daily updates to staff about the status of the hospital. The biggest challenge at the hospital is having enough medical personnel healthy and capable of helping multiple patients who get the more severe symptoms of COVID-19.

“I think right now our biggest concern isn’t bed numbers, it really isn’t even PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), because we’ve been able to work on our supplies pretty aggressively all summer–I think the biggest thing is if we have enough staff, particularly on nights and weekends. We’re talking with our staff about being more flexible and working in areas they aren’t routinely working in just to make sure that we can always have good, capable staff in the event of a surge. ”

Dr. Craig Wittenberg says doctors and nurses on the frontlines of helping those who get sick with the virus are doing all they can to help, but they remain under intense pressure, and will feel even more so if there is another uptick in COVID-19 patients.

“We’re trying to acknowledge that,” he says. “We have multiple employees, whether it’s in the walk-in clinic, the ER, or med surg, that are exposing themselves and putting themselves at risk. Hopefully, this last summer was kind of a precursor, where we got better at doing some of this stuff without the pressure of having large numbers.”

“When I talk to our hospitalists, they say ‘this is what I do,” and they’re just in a routine and they do it well and they’re careful, but we really appreciate all the hard work and risk that everyone is taking here.”