Hospitals

The base has many strong connections with the Metro East. Its ties with the region’s medical community are lesser known.

As coronavirus cases rise and more contagious variants take hold in Missouri, the four largest hospital systems in St. Louis are requiring all their workers to receive the COVID-19 vaccine by fall. Employees at St. Luke’s, SSM Health, BJC HealthCare and Mercy Health will need to be vaccinated by late September. Hospital officials say unvaccinated health workers are more at risk of catching the virus and more likely to spread it to patients.

Hospital leaders from the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force on Monday ended 14 months of weekly livestreamed briefings, citing falling coronavirus cases and hospitalizations of patients with COVID-19. They used the final briefing to encourage residents to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

The state’s budget also provides funding for the public defender system and mistakenly paid unemployment benefits

Hospitals struggled with a shortage of health care workers before the coronavirus pandemic, but they’re really stretched thin as they admit hundreds of patients with the virus every day. To fill gaps in the workforce, hospitals in the St. Louis region are relying more on temporary workers.

In her four-plus decades working as a nurse, Lila Moersch has seen a lot — including the loss of mobility many older patients experience following hospitalization. Time and again, she’s observed adults who were active and independent prior to a hospital stay struggle to walk and take care of themselves afterward. The common problem is the focus of a dissertation Moersch recently completed as part of her program of study at the University of Missouri-St. Louis' College of Nursing.

This comes after the state recently announced a 12-week contract with health care consultant Vizient, as staffing at hospitals continues to be a struggle due to an influx of coronavirus cases.

Mercy Health employees were among the first in the region to receive the newly approved coronavirus vaccine after the first shipments of the shots arrived in Missouri early Monday. The federal government is shipping 51,000 initial doses of the vaccine to the state’s health care workers this week, and millions more are expected to come in the next two months.

Even as hospital leaders warned that their beds were nearly full — and Gov. Mike Parson assured the public that the state was prepared — some hospitals continued to report data that made their capacity appear larger than it was.

Public health officials in Missouri and Illinois are bracing for a surge in coronavirus cases after Thanksgiving gatherings. Health experts had cautioned against traditional family dinners and parties for the holiday, as the virus is mostly being spread through small gatherings in private residences.