Final Reading: Vermont’s health care system is a ‘village on fire’

Two health provider groups brought alarming anecdotes and statistics to the House Committee on Health Care this week, causing one new lawmaker to compare the state’s health care system to a village on fire. Unlike the evacuation of the Statehouse earlier in the week, this was not a drill.

“In the last couple years, we were hoping it was Covid. We were hoping it was the aftereffects of Covid. We were hoping we could dig our way out of it,” Devon Green of the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems said on Thursday morning.

But this week, systemwide, inpatient medical surgical beds in local hospitals are at 97% capacity, with UVM and Dartmouth Hitchcock medical centers both entirely full. As has become the norm, over one-third of those beds are being used by patients who could be transferred to lower-level care facilities that can’t accept them due to their own lack of staffing, Green said.

https://vtdigger.org/2023/01/19/final-reading-vermonts-health-care-system-is-a-village-on-fire/