Emergency department staff at Kitsap County’s lone hospital recently called 911 for urgent help to put out a fire. The “fire”, though, was overwhelmed staff requesting firefighter EMT and paramedic support to plug gaps in patient support due to understaffing. The St. Michael’s Emergency Department is demonstrating that when cost-cutting meets reality, the hospital has to rely on public services to save itself money.

St. Michael’s Hospital is the only hospital in Kitsap County. The county occupies the whole of Kitsap Peninsula, across the Puget Sound from Seattle and King County. Kitsap’s population is approximately 275,000. The communities of Bremerton, Silverdale, Port Orchard, Poulsbo, and Bainbridge Island all rely on St. Michael’s Hospital.

Long wait times have increasingly been the norm at St. Michael’s due to staffing issues. The problem, though, is not that there is a “lack” of capable hospital staff. It is, instead, a continued drive to cut costs by intentionally keeping the staffing – and overhead – low. The result is that physicians and staff are being stretched dangerously thin. Ambulances transporting patients to the ED have been made to wait as much as three hours at times this summer. It is a bit disquieting to think about how the patients whose condition worsened due to this delay.

So the hospital is having to rely on public resources to fill these gaps its leadership has created. Fire crews supporting St. Michael’s Emergency Department staff are being pulled from the community, meaning that they are unable to respond to new active calls as they wait for overwhelmed and overworked hospital staff to tend to their patients.

You may recall that St. Michael’s hospital was the result of consolidation of two hospitals in the Silverdale/Bremerton area under the Virginia Mason/CHI Franciscan Health umbrella. CHI is itself part of the massive national health care system CommonSpirit Health.  

At the time of the latest merger, the CommonSpirit CEO pronounced it was “committed to building a consumer-focused health care system while expanding our presence as a national leader in the transformation of health care delivery.” There’s no word yet whether this transformation was intended to include local fire crews in regular emergency department functions.