NC’s COVID-19 medical shelter will soon go dormant but won’t be dismantled yet
As with many hospitals in North Carolina, everyone who enters the former Sandhills Regional Medical Center must first have their temperature taken and answer several questions about their health to screen for coronavirus.
What’s different here, though, is that this hospital doesn’t have any patients.
The state leased the building and stocked it with beds and other equipment to care for non-COVID-19 patients should hospitals elsewhere become overwhelmed treating people with coronavirus. About 60 doctors, nurses, EMTS and other medical personnel from the N.C. National Guard have manned this medical shelter since April 28.
The shelter hasn’t been needed. The surge of contagious coronavirus patients that North Carolina prepared for hasn’t happened, largely because people have stayed home and physically apart, state and hospital officials say. So on Sunday, the medical shelter will go dormant, and the National Guard members will go home.
But the state isn’t dismantling the shelter just yet. If the coronavirus outbreak intensifies as businesses reopen and people get out again, the shelter can be made ready to take patients within four or five days, said Chuck Lewis, assistant chief of the state Office of Emergency Medical Services.
“That’s just smart planning,” Lewis said Thursday. “That’s being prepared for the worst.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looked at more than 40 places across North Carolina that could be used to house or care for people if hospitals filled with COVID-19 patients, but this was the only state medical shelter that came into being. Mike Sprayberry, director of the Division of Emergency Management, called it an “insurance policy in the event that we need medical surge capacity.”
The state has created medical shelters before, often for hurricanes. During hurricanes Matthew and Florence in recent years, it set up several field hospitals to treat injured or chronically ill people, usually in buildings with large open spaces such as conference centers or churches.
But this marks the first time the state has created a medical shelter in a building that had been a community hospital until a few years ago, and that provides all sorts of advantages, said Keith Acree, spokesman for the state Division of Emergency Management.
“It helps us get out of having a bunch of beds in a big room environment — that whole congregant setting that we’re trying to avoid during COVID,” Acree said. “We can have patients in individual rooms here.”
No walk-in patients allowed
The shelter is not a full-service hospital. There would be no surgeries performed here; the rooms in the former intensive care unit would be used simply as standard hospital rooms. The building has 49 patient rooms but could handle up to 60 patients by using recovery rooms and other spaces, Acree said.
Patients would be transferred from other hospitals after they’ve received treatment and their conditions have stabilized, said Command Sgt. Major Brian Webb, the N.C National Guard’s liaison with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Division of Emergency Management.
“This is short-term,” Webb said. “I just need a couple more days before I go home, but I’m laying there in a bed that could be used potentially for a COVID patient.”
The medical shelter would draw from a region where it would make sense to drive someone here, Lewis said. Asheville would be too far, but the state’s three big metro areas are within a two-hour drive. Hamlet is about 90 miles south of the Triangle and Triad and 80 miles east of Charlotte.
The state is leasing the building from FirstHealth of the Carolinas, a nonprofit company based in Pinehurst that acquired the hospital in late 2016 and closed it less than a year later. Though it required a thorough cleaning, the building had been maintained and had all the power and other necessary utilities, Webb said.
FirstHealth left framed prints on the walls and some furniture, but the beds, gurneys, wheelchairs and other equipment needed to make a hospital came from the State Medical Response System, a network of government agencies and hospitals that respond to disasters. If and when the medical shelter is needed, volunteer doctors, nurses and other health care workers would come help the National Guard through that same system.
The Guard members, who stay at the Holiday Inn Express down the street, made the beds, set up a patient check-in area in the former emergency department and are keeping the empty rooms, nurses stations and other areas clean and sanitized. The USO converted the former gift shop into a canteen with snacks and Starbucks coffee.
The state is spending $240,000 to lease 80,000 square feet in the building for three months, until July 15. The lease comes with optional month-to-month extensions through March 2021, if needed.
The state is talking about keeping the shelter in place through hurricane season, Acree said.
“Who knows beyond that,” he said. “This would be obviously an ideal facility to use if we had to do more medical sheltering.”
This story was originally published May 14, 2020 at 7:22 PM with the headline "NC’s COVID-19 medical shelter will soon go dormant but won’t be dismantled yet."
