Inside an overwhelmed emergency room
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2022
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A Rhode Island emergency department provides a window into how front-line health-care workers are coping with the latest covid surge. And a conversation about how André Leon Talley embodied the heart of the fashion world.
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Laura Forman, Kent Hospital’s emergency department director, says that her days dealing with a deluge of covid patients involves a lot of “best bad options.” Reporters Joyce Koh and Lenny Bernstein reported from Rhode Island, where overwhelmed emergency staff have been forced to see patients in their cars. Forman says her staff are burning out – and the conditions are the worst she’s seen in her 26-year career.
Fashion icon André Leon Talley died this week at the age of 73. Talley was the former creative director of American Vogue, the first and only black person to hold that position. Senior critic-at-large Robin Givhan interviewed Talley many times over the years – and they were also friends.
“He had an incredible capacity for generosity. And it came through in a way that was just as grand as his personality,” Givhan says.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So typically volume picks up sort of after about 10 a.m. it starts to suddenly pick up. |
| 0:12.1 | Laura Foreman is director of the emergency department at Kent Hospital in Rhode Island. |
| 0:18.1 | Thursday, January 13th was the kind of day that Dr. Foreman almost never sees anymore, |
| 0:23.6 | relatively quiet. |
| 0:25.2 | On this particular day, there were only 50 patients being seen in the emergency department. |
| 0:30.8 | But in recent days, they have been totally overwhelmed. |
| 0:35.2 | This is the worst I've seen it. |
| 0:37.0 | And I feel like every day until today, I was saying that like every day we'll turn to |
| 0:41.2 | each other here and say this is the worst I've ever seen. |
| 0:43.8 | I mean, honestly, I've been doing emergency medicine for 26 years now. |
| 0:47.6 | I've never seen anything like this here ever. |
| 0:51.2 | Kent is a mid-size hospital. |
| 0:53.7 | Normally they have enough staff to take care of more than 300 patients. |
| 0:58.0 | But because of staff shortages, right now they can only take care of 200. |
| 1:02.6 | And that has put a lot of extra pressure on the emergency department and on people like |
| 1:07.1 | Dr. Foreman. |
| 1:11.8 | I think the first word that comes to mind is disastrous. |
| 1:16.0 | Overwhelming. |
| 1:18.0 | Frightening, disheartening. |
| 1:21.5 | We are doing things every day that we never could have imagined doing a couple of years ago. |
| 1:25.8 | We are struggling and at times failing to take care of the people who come through the |
| 1:31.3 | door because of lack of staffing, because of lack of space, because of lack of resources. |
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