Like many of you, the WSHA staff have been working at a breakneck pace since COVID began. We have now established or are co-hosting multiple regular meetings: a broad call with the Department of Health and Vice Admiral Bono, a legal call, a clinician call, a PR call, a CFO call, a government affairs call, a crisis standards series, a supply chain call and others.
The WSHA staff is not big and we are juggling many individual questions on topics we are covering in our regular calls. If you or your staff have questions related to one of these calls, I’d like to ask you to please join our regular cadence of information rather than making one-off requests to WSHA staff. This will ensure we have time to focus on moving the big boulders – funding, testing, long-term care, alternate care sites, waivers – that face you now. Thank you.
We can’t truly understand the needs and results of our collective effort without good data. Hospitals are receiving a number of requests for COVID-19 data and we are working on efforts to streamline them. WSHA, in partnership with the emergency management coalitions and local health jurisdictions, has created an online survey to provide situational awareness. At the federal level, the White House Coronavirus Task Force is requesting that all hospitals report certain data on COVID-19 testing results and bed and ventilator capacity. In this letter from the Vice President, hospitals are being asked to report the following two streams of data on a daily basis: COVID-19 test results reported and National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) COVID-19 Module. This data is needed to support FEMA and CDC efforts.
Like all of you, we are tired but committed. We are also hopeful that these efforts and the efforts of our communities to bend the curve are beginning to work.
