CHA Highlights How Hospitals Adapted To Protect Access to Pediatric Care During 2022 ‘Tripledemic’

In recent coverage by Hearst Connecticut examining pediatric bed strain during the 2022 “tripledemic,” the Connecticut Hospital Association (CHA) outlined the complex factors that contributed to capacity pressures and described how hospitals continue to learn from and address those challenges.

In the fall of 2022, hospitals across the U.S. saw a severe spike in the number of children hospitalized with influenza, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a phenomenon that became known as the tripledemic.  Simultaneously, the post-pandemic mental health crisis drove more kids to seek support in emergency departments, and the worsened workforce shortage compounded the effects of the surge, forcing facilities to stretch limited resources.  Hearst’s reporting took a closer look at a new Yale University research study that examined this pediatric bed strain and spoke with CHA about how hospitals responded to these pressures.

“When you think about an emergency department, which is a feeder for medical beds, if you have 30 to 50 mental health patients, and then you also have, at any given time, 30 to 50 medical patients, you’re now talking about an overcrowded ED but using all the same resources, all the same nursing staff, all the same medical staff,” Allison Matthews-Wilson, senior director of workforce and clinical policy, CHA, said in an interview with Hearst Media.  “You’re really talking about impacting care.”

Matthews-Wilson, who worked at Connecticut Children’s when the tripledemic unfolded, described how pediatric providers built collaborative networks with community, state, and regional partners to communicate capacity status and meet the unique needs of patients and their families.  Critically, the state’s two pediatric ICUs and CHA held a weekly triage call to review both systems’ internal numbers, aiming to balance the load between them and make beds available.

“That call, by the way, still continues to this day, so that we continue to have a pulse on where our most vulnerable children in the state of Connecticut are,” Matthews-Wilson said, noting that the hospitals and CHA expanded their conversations to include nearby states to learn best practices and share knowledge, and those relationships are maintained not only in times of crisis but always.

Connecticut hospitals are continuously strengthening infrastructure and plans to prepare for and respond to future surges.  CHA and pediatric ICUs are improving training for emergency department providers at smaller and rural hospitals so they feel more comfortable treating lower-acuity pediatric cases, said Matthews-Wilson. 

“When a community is this ill, for all the reasons that we just mentioned, no one can go it alone,” she said.  “What we learned from that tripledemic and post-pandemic and the behavioral health crisis was that we needed to rely on one another.”

Click here to read the article in CT Insider.