As the number of COVID-19 surges, Kansas Rural Hospital is working hard to transfer patients, some patients were trapped in the emergency room for a week while waiting for beds.

Last winter and summer, when the delta variant first hit the state, space was in short supply. Motient, the company that signed a contract with Kansas to help manage the transfer, said the situation improved slightly this fall, but it has now worsened.

It’s not just rural hospitals looking for beds. Overwhelmed hospitals as far away as Minnesota and Michigan have been calling for large hospitals in Kansas to find beds. There is usually no room at all.

Dr. Richard Watson, the founder of Motient, said on Friday that as the pandemic ends in the second year, long-distance transfers and long waits for beds are becoming commonplace.

“There is no more crazy story than this,” he said. “It’s crazy. When you talk about moving people from Minnesota to Kansas City for treatment. It’s the opposite of the Mayo Clinic.”

Jesse Thomas, also from Motient, said that the proportion of hospitals that need help with transfers is higher than ever before. He said on Monday that it takes an average of eight and a half hours to find a bed in a larger hospital from a smaller hospital to an ambulance or air transport, and it will take about five hours this summer. He pointed out that 8 1/2 hours does not include transportation time to the new facility, and emphasized that half of the patients wait longer.

“When you see a patient who needs a higher level of care and the system is not able to provide it, the patient has to wait a few days,” he said. “It is difficult for that patient. It is also difficult for their family. . It’s just becoming frequent, which is the crazy part, because it used to be rare, and it’s not rare now.”

On Friday, there were 40 patients on the board awaiting transfer. Watson said some people struggled in the emergency room for days, sometimes even more than a week, while waiting for a referral.

Watson said that major hospitals do not want COVID-19 patients unless they are really sick, adding that some hospitals only accept COVID-19 transfers when they need to use ventilators.

“They know their beds are expensive, and they have to keep them for those who need them,” Watson said, adding that COVID-19 patients who only needed oxygen were eventually trapped. He said that the shortage of beds and staff to care for patients also puts patients suffering from heart disease and other health problems into trouble.

He said that the shortage of personnel in nursing homes is also one of the reasons for the shortage of beds, because it means that there is no place to transport patients who have improved but still need additional care.

“If they can’t clean it, you can’t put them on that bed,” he said.

Dr. Jackie Hyland, the chief medical officer of the University of Kansas Health System Topeka University St. Francis Campus, complained about the shortage of nursing homes in a recent phone call with hospital officials in Kansas and Missouri.

Hyland said: “This will cause our emergency room to always have a backup, and keep the patients in the emergency room there to prevent them from being admitted to the hospital bed.”

Watson said he had never seen such a large-scale problem.

“You may have a patient here or there who is in difficulty. The hospital may be in a state of tension, but if the people in the entire system are locked under the same level of care for a few days, they really need to move out. This is a challenge for us. A different world,” he said.

Watson said he expects the capacity problem will only get worse during the holidays.

“People expect a different story,” Watson said. “But you know, we get it: this is someone who has not been vaccinated. Omicron passed through. No one noticed. They all hope it will disappear before Christmas. It will not disappear. The hospital is overcrowded, overcrowded, maybe more than three or four. It was worse a week or even a month ago, but we are still trying to convey the message to a group of people who don’t believe that anything happened. I’m not sure how it works.”

In recent days, a small number of omicron cases have been detected in the state. The most recent two were announced in Wyandotte County in the Kansas City area on Monday. Health officials there said the infected person was a fully vaccinated adult under 40.