K.H.M.H. is Ready to Face Omicron Cases

Chandra Cansino

The staff at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital is finally getting some much needed downtime, as the number of COVID hospitalizations at the national referral facility continues to dwindle, but it may not be for too long.  With Omicron an eventuality, the K.H.M.H. administration is forced to take additional measures to prepare for the inevitable, notwithstanding the present lull at the COVID Unit.  Earlier today, we spoke with Chief Executive Officer Chandra Cansino who walked us through the state of readiness at K.H.M.H.

Chandra Cansino, Chief Executive Officer, K.H.M.H.

“The K.H.M.H. is always ready.  We indeed, at this time we are experiencing a dip in the numbers of COVID cases in the COVID Unit and so we’re grateful for that and so we are using the opportunity now to prepare ourselves in the event of another surge.  Things that we are doing would include servicing and maintenance of equipment that haven’t been able to be maintained and serviced for quite a period of time.  Staff is very busy retraining, getting retraining done.  Nurse Bowman is doing a lot of team-building exercises in the COVID Unit.  They’re reviewing treatment protocols along with the physicians from the COVID Unit.  We’re looking at even infrastructural, when I say infrastructural, we have beds that may need additional power sources, looking at the oxygen supply system to make sure that when we are at our capacity, patients are receiving a hundred percent of oxygen supply.  So yes, those are some of the stuff that we have been doing to prepare for another surge and maybe giving couple staff a little day off here and there as they certainly do need that as well. We pray that we don’t reach to the surge point that we did with the Delta variant, but if we do, that we may be able to transfer perhaps patients that are recovering that have lesser of milder illness out to the district hospitals which we had done on one occasion when we had reached our capacity here at K.H.M.H.”