Last week, Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced that hundreds of medical personnel are coming to Alaska to assist the state’s healthcare facilities. Nearly 300 registered nurses and more than 100 certified nursing assistants or patient care technicians are among the healthcare workers that are expected to arrive, the first round of which have begun arriving. The incoming healthcare workers are part of a comprehensive support plan for Alaska’s healthcare system, finalized last week by the Dunleavy Administration for medical facilities strained by an influx of COVID-19 patients.
Alaska’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Anne Zink, told KSRM:
“We are seeing all of our hospitals very strained not only for caring for COVID patients but caring for everything else from dirt bike accidents to strokes to heart attacks. That’s why, regardless of your vaccine status, regardless if you’ve got COVID or not, this affects all of us because we all depend on our really limited healthcare infrastructure. We have been working with hospitals across the start and are bringing up just over 400 healthcare workers which will South Peninsula and as well as Central Peninsula (Hospital). We have had some great robust conversations bout where the initial people can go first and how we can best decompress the system as a whole, but they have been active participants in that conversation to help us decide on where the first healthcare workers can go.”
Gov. Dunleavy addressed the situation to KSRM Tuesday in Soldotna:
“I just want to say that we are having high cases now with this delta variant, there’s no doubt about it, but I would like to remind folks to remember back a few months when Alaska was a leader. For example, we were one of the first to roll out monoclonal antibodies in the country in a clinic type fashion. We continue to do that. We continue to roll to have those monoclonal antibodies available for people that do get infected. We were one of the first to roll out the vaccines and we did it probably better than anyone up until March/April when the vaccine demand kind of leveled off. We have always looked at making sure that our hospital capacity was there and so recently, as you know, last week and a half ago, we had a press conference in which we announced that we’re going to have several hundred workers come to the state of Alaska to assist. We’re going to have, for example, dialysis machines, dialysis machines also come to Alaska to make sure we have our capacity for our hospitals to be able to deal with the increase in demand.”
Adam Crum, Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services says that Central Peninsula Hospital has an allocation of staff coming down, but the initial wave of incoming staff would be in medical facilities across Anchorage and the Mat-Su Borough due to the greater staffing capacity and the potential for more beds to open up.
