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Iowaâs health care system stretched â but not broken â by pandemic
âThe genieâs out of the bottleâ for innovating changes in care, leaders say Friday, March 12, 2021 6:00 AM
The need to rapidly respond to the pandemic crisis gave Iowa health care providers unprecedented permission to do things differently over the past year and will greatly influence decisions about changes to the health system in the future, says Dr. Tom Evans, president and CEO of the Iowa Healthcare Collaborative.
“We accepted that we had to do some things differently,” Evans said. “And I think my lesson is that I’m actually excited about it I think the genie’s out of the bottle. I think that we as a health care community now have permission to actually innovate and figure out how we construct better care that’s more effective and more cost-effective for our state.”
Hunter 03/11/20 Cedar Rapids Police say an officer was injured by a drunk driver as he was directing traffic after a car-motorcycle crash Tuesday night.
IPR File
The Henry County Health Center in Mount Pleasant is one of the state s 82 critical access hospitals. It has just 25 beds. Smaller, rural hospitals like this were easily overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients during surges.
A year into the pandemic, COVID-19 has put an enormous strain on Iowa’s health care system, from the influxes of COVID patients to staffing shortages and budget crunches. Iowa hospitals and health care workers reflect on living with COVID-19 a year in.
Joel Wells said the worst moments at rural Wayne County Hospital came last fall, when COVID-19 hospitalizations were spiking statewide.
Wells, a family physician in the third decade of his career, said he had nine COVID-19 patients. That’s a lot for a 25-bed rural critical access hospital in south central Iowa.
Black people in Iowa develop and die from cancer at higher rates than their neighbors, according to an annual report from researchers at the University of Iowa.
“The causes of these disparities are deeply ingrained in our society, and it will take significant effort at many levels over a long period of time to address them,” Dr. George Weiner, the director of the Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Iowa s Hospitals and Clinics, told reporters. “If we are able to do so successfully, it will benefit all Iowans.”
Weiner and the co-authors of the report presented their findings, with a focus on racial disparities, during a virtual panel Wednesday morning.