St. George Regional Hospital turning down patient transfers from other locations due to a lack of staff and beds

St. George, Utah – According to Intermountain Healthcare’s St. George Regional Hospital healthcare workers, their patients hospitalized or in the ICU are unvaccinated. With rising concerns that crisis care could come soon, doctors may have to pick and choose which patients get care.

According to hospital officials, that hasn’t happened yet.

“We have not needed to do that in terms of choosing who gets a ventilator and who doesn’t get a ventilator, we haven’t had to take someone off of a ventilator so someone else can get it, we are limiting elective procedures requiring hospitalizations,” says Dr. Patrick Carroll, the hospital medical director.

The hospital is turning down patient transfers from other locations due to a lack of staff and beds, Dr. Carroll said.

“We’ve never had to do that in the history of the hospital before this time, and that’s something that we now have to do because we simply don’t have the beds, we don’t have the staff in the ICU to care for patients and transfer them in,” he says.

The majority of patients in the hospital who are unvaccinated have immunocompromised health conditions, Dr. Carroll said.

He is pleading for residents to get immunized.

“I am unaware of any patient, in St. George Regional Hospital that has died from a vaccine complication,” he says.

According to doctors, amid the Delta Variant surge, they are also seeing more healthy, young, or pregnant people who are unvaccinated and get sick with COVID-19.