California faces shortage of medical personnel due to pandemic

SACRAMENTO, California, United States (AP) – California is in desperate need of more medical staff in facilities overrun with coronavirus patients, but has received very little help from a volunteer program created by the governor Gavin Newsom at the start of the pandemic. Initially, around 95,000 people raised their hands, but now only 14 of them work in the area.

Very few volunteers have qualified for the California Health Corps, and only a handful of them have the experience to help the more severe cases of COVD-19 that are pushing intensive care units to the limit.

“Unfortunately, it didn’t work and the goal is laudable,” said Stephanie Roberson, director of government relations for the California Nursing Association.

Newsom formed the Health Corps before the crisis in California and other states. COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and the need for intensive care are skyrocketing in America’s most populous state as the rest of the country experiences a resurgence that overwhelms the usual pool of nurses temporarily affected.

Likewise, more than 80,000 medical volunteers responded to a call for help in New York at the start of the pandemic, when the state was the nation’s biggest source of contagion, and some were affected. But hospitals have more often switched to temporary workers to meet needs, said Jean Moore, director of the Center for Healthcare Workforce Research at State University of New York at Albany.

Other states, including Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, have applied various forms of recruiting volunteers, with little success.

“A volunteer corps assumes that it’s very easy to get people” into the system, said Sean Clarke, associate dean and professor at the Rory Meyers School of Nursing at New York University. “It seems to me that the way to proceed has not been determined.”

California officials say they need 3,000 temporary medical workers, but on Thursday they only had a third. As a result, hospitals are dispensing with the state’s nurse-to-patient ratio, which means less care for critically ill patients.

Newsom believed that volunteers from the health corps would fill the staff shortage in health facilities. Qualified personnel include retired or inactive physicians, nurses and respiratory care specialists. Although they are volunteers, they receive what the state calls competitive salaries.

Of the 95,000 people who initially expressed interest in the Health Corps, only a third had a valid professional license and about 4,600 were qualified. Only 850 of them were ultimately registered, a number that has remained unchanged despite constant calls from the governor to participate.

Some of the volunteers “don’t have the high standard training needed to be helpful right now,” said David Simon, spokesperson for the California Hospital Association.

“It might just be that nurses know that this may not be the safest place to work right now,” said Roberson of the Nurses Association.

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