Samaritan’s Purse will open a field hospital for COVID patients in hard-hit part of NC
The humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse will construct a 30-bed emergency field hospital in Western North Carolina to help five beleaguered small hospitals in the region treat COVID-19 patients.
Work to construct the tent hospital on the grounds of Caldwell UNC Health Care in Lenoir will begin on Friday. The hospital will be used to treat patients from Caldwell UNC, Appalachian Regional Healthcare System in Boone, Carolinas Healthcare System Blue Ridge in Morganton and Catawba Valley Health System and Frye Regional Medical Center, both in Hickory.
The field hospital will be used for COVID-19 patients who are not sick enough to require mechanical ventilation to help them breathe. The tent facility will take 48 hours to construct and will be ready to begin treating patients next week, according to Samaritan’s Purse spokeswoman Alyssa Benson.
The field hospital marks the first time hospitals in North Carolina have looked outside their walls to treat the increasing number of COVID-19 patients in the state.
“These five western NC hospitals are overwhelmed and at capacity as case numbers in the state continue to climb,” Benson wrote in an email. “They reached out to Samaritan’s Purse to request our assistance, and we are grateful to come alongside them to provide additional capacity and care.”
Samaritan’s Purse agreed to build, supply and provide staffing for the facility and says it has received “overwhelming interest from medical personnel across the United States who are willing to serve,” according to a release from the organization and the five hospitals.
Laura Easton, president and CEO of Caldwell UNC Health Care, said the hospitals are grateful for the help.
“Planning for this added capacity now will help us provide the level of care our communities need as volumes continue to grow in our region,” Easton said in a statement.
The number of COVID-19 patients in the region has spiked in recent weeks, said UNC spokesman Phil Bridges.
“Many of the hospitals in this region are operating at maximum capacity,” Bridges said in an email. “This spike is expected to sustain or accelerate into February, and the additional resources the emergency field hospital will provide can help assure we can address the needs of all patients.”
As of Thursday, a record 3,472 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in North Carolina, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. That number has more than doubled since the week before Thanksgiving, straining hospital beds and staffing across the state.
Last spring, the state division of Emergency Management leased the former Sandhills Regional Medical Center in Hamlet in case hospitals became overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic. The state called the 49-bed hospital a medical shelter and said it would be used for non-COVID-19, non-surgical patients who are not critically ill, giving hospitals more room to treat people infected with the coronavirus.
So far, the state has not opened the Hamlet shelter.
Samaritan’s Purse, a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization based in Boone, has operated field hospitals in troubled areas for years. During the pandemic, it has established tent hospitals to treat COVID-19 patients in Italy, the Bahamas and in New York’s Central Park.
Samaritan’s Purse treated more than 300 people in Central Park in April and May after Mount Sinai Health System invited the group to the city at the height of the pandemic, according to The New York Times. But in a liberal city, the group drew criticism for its opposition to same-sex marriage and founder Franklin Graham’s political activities and past statements criticizing Islam.
Graham told The Times that Samaritan’s Purse had never denied care to anyone because of a difference of belief, and responded to critics of the group’s beliefs on Facebook.
“It seems tone-deaf to be attacking our religious conviction about marriage at the very moment thousands of New Yorkers are fighting for their lives and dozens of Samaritan’s Purse workers are placing their lives at risk to provide critical medical care,” he wrote.
This story was originally published December 31, 2020 at 3:55 PM with the headline "Samaritan’s Purse will open a field hospital for COVID patients in hard-hit part of NC."
