Emergency Medical Staff Stay in St. Cloud

(KNSI) – The Department of Defense emergency staffing team will remain at St. Cloud Hospital for another 30 days following Governor Tim Walz’s appeal to the federal government for the continued help.

The team arrived in Minnesota in November on an initial 30-day deployment, but Governor Walz says he requested the extension, saying “We are at a critical moment in our pandemic response, and we are using every resource available to relieve the pressure on our overworked health care personnel and to make sure patients receive the treatment they need and deserve. I am astounded by the resiliency of our doctors, nurses, and hospital staff, and my administration is working every day to help make their jobs easier. That’s why I’m grateful to President Biden and his administration for accepting our urgent request for more staffing support in our hospitals.”

According to a press release, Governor Walz is enacting a multi-faceted campaign to support Minnesota hospitals and long-term care facilities facing high caseloads and worker shortages, including deploying National Guard skilled-nursing response teams to provide staffing support at long-term care facilities, creating four alternative care sites to treat non-critical patients who no longer need to be hospitalized, launching an initiative to recruit, train, and deploy 1,000 new certified nursing assistants to Minnesota long-term care facilities, securing federal emergency staffing teams to relieve staff at three Minnesota hospitals, making $50 million in federal American Rescue Plan funding available for immediate emergency grants to long-term care facilities to hire and retain employees, expanding the Emergency Staffing Pool so that short-term emergency temporary staff could be used to open additional long-term care beds for patients ready to be discharged from a hospital, and directing the Department of Human Services to free up capacity at state-operated long-term care facilities.

Minnesota hospitals are currently treating nearly 1,600 people for COVID-19 with nearly 370 COVID-positive Minnesotans in the ICU. Hospitals report the vast majority of these patients are unvaccinated.

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