In the News

“ERs are overwhelmed,” said Dr. Jim Miner. 

“We have been holding steady as best as we can,” said Dr. Nancy Van Buren, a medical director at Memorial Blood Centers who also works for HCMC. “It is not a crisis mode but it is a very urgent mode.

“We’ve seen it spread really quickly,” said Dr. Hannah Lichtsinn, who practices internal medicine and pediatrics for Hennepin Healthcare. “I’m most concerned about our kids under the age of five who haven’t been able to get vaccinated yet.”

With temps hovering in that dangerous zone for several days, Dr. Jim Miner knows he’ll be busy. He’s the chair of emergency medicine at Hennepin Healthcare.

“The stuff we’ve seen show up in our emergency department tends to be ‘I just went out there for a few minutes, I thought I was gonna be OK,’” he said.

“We are seeing people sick enough with the flu that they are in our emergency rooms and our hospitals already which is a huge change from what we saw last year,” said Dr. Hannah Lichtsinn, a Hennepin Healthcare physician who specializes in internal medicine and pediatrics.

“The folks who have received the booster are disproportionately white compared to groups that have been fully vaccinated,” sad Dr. Tyler Winkelman of Hennepin Healthcare.

“We were able to manage these last 30 days with a little less strain on our staff and a great deal of boost to the morale of our staff,” said Dr. David Hilden, vice president of medical affairs at Hennepin Healthcare, which received one team at Hennepin County Medical Center. “It felt like the cavalry came into help.”

Burnout among parents is rampant, according to Hennepin Healthcare psychologist Dr. Talee Vang.

“The courage to speak up and say, ‘Hey, that wasn’t a great decision I made’ or ‘I regret it?’ For people that are still hesitant, I would hope that would go a long way,” said Dr. Matthew Prekker, an HCMC critical care specialist who treated Bollig.

COVID in Minnesota: Beds not available for ER patients as hospital capacity pushed to limits
WCCO 4

“Organizations that do this work well recognize that DEI is part of their strategic plan,” said Chief People and Culture Officer Tonya Jackman Hampton. “For us, we coin it as health equity. A second strategic pathway is people and culture.”

“Many of us are starting to feel helpless because we’ve been living this crisis for so long,” said Dr. Shirlee Xie.

“It feels like you are drinking from a fire hose with no way to control that flow,” Dr. John Hick, an emergency physician at Hennepin Healthcare in Minnesota, told reporters Tuesday.

Steve Grove has seen his share of coronavirus deaths in his role as a chaplain at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.

Recently, one dying patient’s family gathered in a conference room. One by one they were taken to the patient’s bedside, while the other relatives watched on Zoom.

“It’s a huge pain in the butt and the connection drops and it’s weird,” he acknowledged.

“There’s a lot of vicarious traumas that can happen. Vicarious trauma is just this traumatization that can occur from not being there on your own but hearing the details or seeing images that can traumatize people,” said Dr. Talee Vang, a behavioral health psychologist with Hennepin Healthcare.