University of California Davis Medical Center began experiencing an unexpectedly high volume of patient calls early Tuesday evening, which is not an uncommon occurrence and one that the hospital has protocol in place to handle. However, for reasons that aren’t clear, other hospitals also began to report high volumes of calls.
“The hospitals see surges all the time,” EMS county coordinator Ben Merin told The Bee. “They manage those surges individually, just fine, all the time. Tuesday night it happened to be enough of the hospitals surging that it had a communitywide impact. So rather than having diversions happening, we enacted protocol to control that.”
The standard protocol directs paramedics to bring patients to the closest facility, but the emergency protocol delays the process by requiring them to call the control center beforehand for guidance about which hospital has room for the patient. The surge lasted about four hours and put significant strain on other hospitals in the area that were forced to adjust to handle the high volume of emergencies, including the cancellation of eight elective surgeries at UC Davis, according to The Bee.
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