Overwhelmed Delaware County hospitals get help from volunteers during COVID-19 surge

Behind every doctor is a small army of people who help keep the hospital running. But who steps in when half the army has COVID-19?

In Delaware County, the answer is residents.

When omicron maxed out the county’s hospitals earlier this month — filling beds with new patients and forcing infected staff to call out sick — hospital officials sent out a distress signal to the Delaware County Medical Reserve Corps.

The decade-old volunteer group has provided emergency relief throughout the pandemic, most recently deploying a fraction of its 1,700 active members to four Crozer health hospitals — Crozer-Chester Medical Center, Delaware County Memorial Hospital, Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital, and Taylor Hospital.

At those facilities, more than 100 staff members have been sidelined by the virus in the last month and more than 140 patients are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, said Gary Zimmer, chief medical officer for Crozer Health.

“That’s about a third of all the business that we’re doing,” Zimmer said. “In order to keep up with it, we’ve restricted elective surgeries and reassigned staff.”

The silver lining, Zimmer said, has been the medical corps volunteers.

Donning blue vests emblazoned with “Delco MRC,” members of the group gathered Tuesday outside the emergency room at Crozer to discuss their shifts behind the hospital’s packed walls, where they’ve been on call since Jan. 4.

“It takes a village to raise a child, but what does it take to maintain that village?” said volunteer coordinator Dennis Day. “It’s people within that community stepping up and meeting the need.”

Among the helping hands are physicians, nurses, and pharmacists, but the bulk of the MRC consists of non-medical staff “from all walks of life” who want to pitch in, according to Day. The work isn’t glamorous: restocking sanitation supplies, bringing water to patients, and moving beds between rooms.

“We do all the tiny things,” said volunteer Georg Strey.

But one of the corps’ biggest benefits in an understaffed hospital is the simple human presence. “A lot of what they’ve been doing, quite frankly, is supporting people and just letting them know they’re not forgotten,” said Danielle Koerner, community outreach coordinator with the county’s Department of Emergency Services. “They’ve been a big source of support.”

Volunteer groups like this one have grown in Philadelphia and its collar counties since the beginning of the pandemic. While hardly novel in concept, the reserve corps has ballooned from about 500 registered members in March 2020 to more than 3,400 today, about half of which are considered active, according to group leaders.

Yet more help is needed. Monica Taylor, chair of the Delaware County Council, said the current deployment has worked 850 hours at the four hospitals. Even as coronavirus cases begin to drop across the region, there’s still high demand for volunteers. Among the active members, about “10 to 20% tend to do all the heavy lifting,” Day said.

Delco’s MRC formed over a decade ago, but prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the group hadn’t been called upon the way they are today. Beyond hospital staffing, the group has been running an emergency response clinic on the vacant Glen Mills School campus, as well as holding educational seminars and community events.

For hospital networks, the support is helpful but not a permanent solution.

Zimmer noted that the percentage of patients in critical care during the current omicron wave has been far less than previous surges of the virus and that most of the hospitalized patients are unvaccinated. Still, staff levels reached such dangerous lows that the hospital began calling back workers from isolation before their five-day quarantines were over, Zimmer said earlier this month.

The medical director said attrition and burnout have also plagued the hospitals over the last two years, similar to what other health systems have experienced across the nation.

“It’s been a prolonged disaster,” Zimmer said. “We’re understaffed like everyone is understaffed.”