Field Hospital Set Up In Fredericksburg For Coronavirus Surge

FREDERICKSBURG, VA — Mary Washington Hospital has set up a field hospital in a parking garage next to the hospital's emergency department in anticipation of a surge in patients with the new coronavirus, or COVID-19. Although hospital officials hope the extra space won't be needed, they wanted to create the additional emergency room capacity in case the number of coronavirus patients reaches levels beyond its current capacity in the next couple months.

After watching the health care system get overrun in Italy and then seeing how quickly hospital emergency rooms in Washington State were pushed to their limits starting almost a month ago, officials with Mary Washington Healthcare, which operates both the Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg and the Stafford Hospital, decided to take a proactive approach to the coronavirus.

Mary Washington Healthcare created a pandemic preparedness committee about five weeks ago that included hospital officials, nurses and other staff leaders. The committee has been meeting regularly to develop ways to essentailly "reoperationalize how we do everything at this hospital in order to be prepared to take care of our COVID and coronavirus patients when they are here," Dr. Christopher Newman, chief operations officer and chief medical officer for Mary Washington Healthcare, said Wednesday night during a virtual town hall organized by the health care system.

"We wanted to be proactive and not reactive in our responses. And we began to invest in things that would prepare us should coronavirus and the pandemic truly ramp up and reach our community here in the Fredericksburg region," Newman said.

Mary Washington Hospital officials studied medical responses in New York City and other parts of the country that are facing surges in coronavirus cases. They saw that emergency departments and intensive care units were the first to become overwhelmed.

After reviewing the best ways to get prepared for a surge in patients, the hospital then set a goal to double the capacity of its emergency department and its intensive care unit.

In Fredericksburg, the emergency department at Mary Washington Hospital can reach its daily capacity of about 250 patients on days when there is not a pandemic, Newman said. So the hospital decided it needed to figure out a way to create more space for an increase in patients.

The hospital looked at using tents on its campus where it could expand its emergency department. But officials ultimately decided a field hospital using its parking garage was the most secure structure to care for coronavirus patients.

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"We invested in that in our community before it was truly needed. And we hope that we never will need it here. But we wanted to be prepared," Newman said.

The makeshift emergency hospital in the parking garage is filled with old hospital recliners that have been turned into treatment chairs. Plant hangers stationed next to the chairs will be used as intravenous bag holders.

"We don't have a lot of capacity to see more," he said. "So we knew we needed to be able to expand that capacity in a creative way."

On Thursday morning, the Virginia Department of Health reported 1,706 positive cases of the coronavirus, up 222 cases from Wednesday. The health department also reported 41 deaths from the coronavirus, an increase of seven. The health department reported that 246 people are hospitalized with the coronavirus.

Virginia State Health Commissioner Norm Oliver said Wednesday that 145 of the people hospitalized in Virginia with the coronavirus are in intensive care units and 108 of them are on ventilator support.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced Wednesday that state officials have decided to add surge capacity at locations in Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads and the Richmond area. The state chose the former Exxon Mobil site on Gallows Road in Fairfax County across from Inova Fairfax Hospital for Northern Virginia and the Hampton Roads Convention Center, which is near the Sentara and Riverside Hospitals in southeast Virginia. Northam said he hopes to announce the Richmond location on Friday.

In cities already facing a surge in coronavirus patients, fields hospitals are being set up. In New York City, a field hospital in Central Park is being used to treat overflow patients from the nearby Mount Sinai hospitals. The California National Guard set up a temporary hospital in Indio, California that will house 125 beds, helping to ease the burden on the local hospital systems.

Military personnel set up a field hospital at CenturyLink Event Center on Tuesday in Seattle that will house 250 beds for non-coronavirus patients. Seattle hospitals want to save their facilities for patients with the coronavirus.

At Mary Washington Hospital, doctors and nurses from other departments have agreed to help care for patients in the emergency department and the intensive care unit. Furthermore, primary care physicians from outside the Mary Washington Healthcare system have gotten in touch with the hospital to let officials know they are willing to come in and help in case the hospital sees a surge in a patients, Newman said.

For its intensive care units at both Stafford Hospital and Mary Washington Hospital, Mary Washington Healthcare's goal has been to double the capacity.

"We have access internally to about 71 ventilators and we're looking at creative ways to create ICU rooms out of rooms that are traditionally used for other things, such as cardiac procedures, post anesthesia care units, operating rooms, etc. that would be able to support ventilators in caring for sicker patients," Newman said. "So again, we wanted to prepared up-front."

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