“This is an extreme example of things that are happening across our state and across our nation right now,” Jayson Dick, from the nurses association, said.
Bridget Chavez, KIRO 7 NewsOn Saturday, Oct. 8, the emergency room staff at St. Michael Medical Center in Silverdale had to call in firefighters to help treat patients. The fire chief, Jason Christian, said a charge nurse called around 10:30 p.m. and said her staff was drowning and they needed help.
“She expressed that this was a bit of an unprecedented request, and she said the conditions in the emergency room were horrible,” Christian said. The nurse called the backline to a 911 dispatcher, and that dispatcher called the battalion chief for Central Kitsap Fire and Rescue. The battalion chief dispatched two firefighter EMTs to help.
“She was describing to the dispatcher that they only had five nurses on duty and they had over 45 patients just in the waiting room,” Christian said. The firefighters helped in the ER for about an hour and a half. “They checked patients’ vital signs, up to 30 patients, they cleaned rooms, they moved beds, they did whatever they could do to support the ER staff to get them out of that crisis mode,” Christian said. He said that firefighters will always respond to calls for help but admitted that this was not sustainable.
“It did impact service in that, that unit was taken out of their primary area,” he said. “It lowered the reliability to make them available for a 911 call in the community.”
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