HONDO, Texas — Doctors at Medina Regional Hospital are treating people under a tent because the brick-and-mortar facility is full with COVID-19 patients.
Staff set up the small tent underneath a portico outside the Hondo hospital’s emergency department. The makeshift structure saves space indoors, where staff converted the Emergency Room waiting area into a COVID-19 ward.
“It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen,” chief nursing officer Billie Bell said. “We’ve been full the last two weeks and our emergency department is completely overflowing.”
“We’re kind of in a warlike mentality,” she continued. “We are utilizing every space that we have available to care for patients.”
Medina Regional does not have an intensive care unit. Normally, the hospital transports its sickest patients to urban facilities for more specialized care.
But urban facilities are filling up with COVID-19 patients and can no longer accept all patients from rural hospitals seeking intensive care.
“So we keep them here,” Bell said. “We don’t have an ICU as a small hospital, but we’re caring for patients at an ICU capacity because they have nowhere else to go.”
Doctors at Medina Regional can provide the same medication that San Antonio doctors can. However, the rural hospital is not staffed to provide 24-hour intensive care and specialized treatment.
Bell is asking the state for more nurses to help alleviate the shortage.
“I’ve been in health care 25 years and this is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” she said. “I never thought we’d come to a point where we couldn’t transfer a patient to a higher level of care when we needed to.”
Bell says 85 percent of COVID-19 patients at Medina Regional are unvaccinated.