St. Luke’s Chief Medical Officer on leadership in a time of COVID-19

Note: The following open letter has the support of more than 700 physicians and advanced practice providers affiliated with St. Luke’s; it does not represent the position of all providers.

I’ve been a practicing pulmonary and critical care physician here in Idaho for 21 years. Every year, I see dozens of very ill people.

My clinical colleagues have seen any number of tragic cases and seasonal flu epidemics and provided bedside care during the last pandemic with the H1N1 flu.

We have never seen anything like what we saw play out several weeks ago in the Twin Falls ICUs, as the COVID-19 pandemic came to Idaho, beginning in the Wood River Valley.

Over a period of days, we saw critically ill patients transported to Twin Falls. We saw our ICU capacity in that facility steadily erode. We saw patients diverted to other parts of the health system, we saw care teams struggle to support the number of critically ill patients requiring ventilator support and we saw one intensive care unit become a respiratory unit over a period of about five days.

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