A14 The BulleTin • Tuesday, June 29, 2021
High court won’t revive school’s transgender bathroom ban
BY DENISE LAVOIE AND
MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press
The U.S. Supreme Court on
Monday rejected a Virginia
school board’s appeal to re-
instate its transgender bath-
room ban, handing a victory to
transgender rights groups and
a former high school student
who fought in court for six
years to overturn the ban.
After learning that the
high court refused to hear the
board’s appeal, Gavin Grimm,
now 22, said that his long battle
is over. “We won,” he tweeted.
“Honored to have been part of
this victory,” he added.
Grimm was a 15-year-old
student at Gloucester High
School when he was banned
from using the boys bath-
room. The Gloucester County
School Board’s policy required
Grimm to use restrooms that
corresponded with his biolog-
ical sex — female — or private
bathrooms. Grimm filed a fed-
eral lawsuit that wound its way
through the courts for six years.
Grimm said that being
forced to use the nurse’s room,
a private bathroom and the
girl’s restroom was humiliating
and severely interfered with his
education. He said he is heart-
ened by his victory in court
because “a win in Virginia is a
win everywhere.”
Nurses
Continued from A1
“I’ve been here eight years,
and I’ve never seen this many
acutely ill patients coming
through the door,” said Dr.
Mary Tanski, interim chair of
the OHSU Emergency Depart-
ment. “When we see sicker
patients, that’s a stress. Nurses
were already tired. They’ve
been at the front lines for a
year. It’s to the point that we
have seen some of our nursing
colleagues leave the profes-
sion.”
Traffic jam
When COVID-19 arrived in
Oregon, many hospitals expe-
rienced an immediate drop in
business. In the first months of
the pandemic, OHSU’s emer-
gency department saw patient
volume fall by half.
Some hospitals figured they
could afford to cut staff, save
some money and lessen the
financial pounding they were
taking as a result of the pan-
demic.
But ER traffic is hard to pre-
dict. By law, they don’t have the
luxury of turning people away.
Sure enough, ER demand
surged this spring to a level
that caught everyone by sur-
prise.
After studiously avoiding
hospitals and doctors’ offices
for a year due to COVID-19,
many of the patients are too
sick to be treated and released.
That has led to another prob-
lem: Some hospitals don’t have
enough staffed beds elsewhere
in the hospital to house the in-
flux.
That leads to “boarding,” the
practice of holding patients in
the ER, until a hospital bed or
some other destination can be
found. The practice is contro-
versial because it keeps patients
in limbo and because it blocks
the normal flow of sick patients
into the hospital. Behavioral
health patients are particularly
prone to boarding because of
the chronic shortage of beds
dedicated to their needs.
The backlog of boarded pa-
tients means more delays for
new ER patients, who can wait
hours to see a nurse. Under-
standably angry patients and
their families at times lash out
at hospital staff.
Karlee Hoffart is a four-year
veteran of the ER at Kaiser Per-
manente Sunnyside Medical
Center in Clackamas. “I love
the emergency department,”
she said. “I’m a bit of an adren-
aline junkie. I like being a val-
ued member of a small team.”
But things have changed in
recent months.
“We cannot move our pa-
tients,” she said. “There are
days when I start a shift, half of
our beds are taken up by folks
needing a hospital bed. Some-
times, they can wait 24 hours.”
In the interim, it is Hoffart
and her colleagues who must
treat them.
“We are no longer just ER
Wyden
Continued from A1
“I believe what we will hear
about is making sure there are
personnel available in the West
to fight multiple fires at the
same time. This is a departure
from the past. Usually we have
one big fire and other western
states would chip in to help
the state that was hit the hard-
est. Now, we are talking about
something that is unprece-
dented: Big fires simultane-
ously throughout the West.”
Wyden led the committee
for about one year, from 2013
to 2014, when he took over the
tax-writing Finance Commit-
tee, which he now leads again
after Democrats became the
Senate’s majority party with
Vice President Kamala Har-
ris the tie-breaker in a 50-50
chamber.
Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times, file
Nurse Stephanie Scott keeps an eye on patients in the emergency department at St. Joseph’s Hospital in
Orange, California, in 2018.
nurses,” she said. “We are men-
tal health counselors; we are
hospital nurses; we are being
asked to do it all, with no extra
help.”
Nowhere to divert
The problem is more than
just a shortage of skilled work-
ers and staffed hospital beds.
Emergency responders are
delivering patient loads that are
too much for hospital emer-
gency rooms to handle. The
surge of calls began several
months ago and only worsened
in the last two months.
Emergency calls always
spike in the summer as more
people are on the roads. In
Multnomah County, the num-
ber would typically increase to
about 300 a day. This month,
the county is running on aver-
age 390 a day.
When Portland-area hospi-
tal ERs are jammed, they go on
“divert” status, meaning am-
bulances that would normally
go there are diverted to an-
other hospital. It’s never been
unusual for one or two met-
ro-area hospitals to get over-
whelmed on a busy night.
But in recent months it’s
become almost a daily occur-
rence for every hospital in the
area to go on divert.
OHSU, for example, spent
about 150 hours per month in
divert status in April and May
2020. A year later, Tanski con-
firmed, OHSU’s emergency de-
partment was full and off-lim-
its between 450 and 500 hours
per month.
OHSU is one of the region’s
key trauma hospitals that takes
the most serious cases.
“When we’re on divert it
presents a challenge,” Tanski
said. “It just leads to this spiral
effect.”
That is a sea change for lo-
cal county officials who run a
sort of air-traffic control sys-
tem coordinating ambulances
with hospitals. In May of last
year, all local hospitals went
on total divert status maybe
once or twice, said Shane Ryan,
Wyden continues to sit on
the Energy and Natural Re-
sources Committee as the No.
2 Democrat behind Chairman
Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Senate rules allow one com-
mittee chairmanship per mem-
ber.
Budget details are decided
by the Appropriations Com-
mittee; Oregon Sen. Jeff Merk-
ley leads the subcommittee
that oversees the Forest Ser-
vice.
Wyden spoke on a weekend
when temperatures exceeded
100 in virtually all of Oregon,
and drought affects most of the
state.
Wyden and Merkley toured
Oregon twice in the aftermath
of the 2020 Labor Day wild-
fires, which affected all four
metropolitan areas on the
westside — Portland, Salem,
Eugene and Medford — with
a spokesman for Metro West
Ambulance, which serves
Washington County. This May,
all hospitals were diverted 54%
of the time.
Ambulances have made
some unusual trips in re-
sponse. Tualatin Valley Fire &
Rescue had to transport a pa-
tient to a hospital in Corvallis
after Portland-area hospitals
turned them away, said Cas-
sandra Ulven, spokeswoman
for the department.
The deluge of shootings and
other street violence has con-
tributed to the surge.
“Our trauma volume is
huge,” said Jon Jui, medical di-
rector of Multnomah County
Emergency Medical Services.
“We’ve never seen people get-
ting shot at this rate, often at
random. I’ve been doing EMS
for over three decades, and
I’ve never seen problems this
sustained, this prolonged. We
have a very significant strain
on our emergency system.”
Slow to staff up
Kaiser and Providence
nurses argue the solution to the
problem is simple: Hospitals
need to hire more staff, and
they need to retain the talent
they have.
Hospital officials said they
are trying to do exactly that.
“No one would dispute
that this is a challenging time
across the state, region and
country when it comes to care-
giver staffing, going on divert
and wait times in emergency
departments,” Providence
spokesman Gary Walker said.
“Providence is actively man-
aging the needs, including
spending hundreds of hours
in recruiting additional care-
givers. We are excited to have a
group of 54 new nurses joining
us for ED residency in a couple
of weeks.”
Legacy Health Systems said
it has hired more than 250
nurses in 2021 and will soon
accept 50 additional nurses
into its residency program.
Providence, Kaiser and Leg-
wildfire smoke or worse. (The
Almeda Fire swept through
communities south of Medford
and destroyed an estimated
2,500 homes, the largest con-
centrated loss statewide.)
Wildfires also burned on the
central coast, Central Oregon
and near Roseburg and Grants
Pass.
Wyden says he expects one
element of the response plan
to be cooperation among the
agencies responsible for fight-
ing forest fires. “Local, state
and federal firefighters are go-
ing to be tightly coordinated
in order to deal with this grave
threat,” he said.
In Oregon, that responsibil-
ity is divided among fire pro-
tection districts, Oregon De-
partment of Forestry — which
also contracts to protect West-
ern Oregon forests overseen by
the Bureau of Land Manage-
acy all declined to provide any
information about nurse attri-
tion or turnover.
Kaiser said it is hiring so-
called traveling nurses from
employment agencies to fill
the gaps in its own payroll, and
it’s offering sign-on bonuses
for registered nurses who will
work nights in the ER.
“The nursing shortage af-
fecting the whole nation is im-
pacting the Northwest region
as well,” said Kaiser spokes-
woman Debbie Karman.
“We’re actively working to re-
cruit and hire nursing staff.”
Hoffart, the Kaiser nurse,
suggested Kaiser should con-
centrate on retaining its trained
veterans. Attrition is enor-
mous. “She and her colleagues
estimate that half or more of
the nurses who worked in the
Kaiser Sunnyside ER last year
have left the department.”.
Hoffart is a steward for the
nurse’s union, the Oregon Fed-
eration of Nurses and Health
Professionals, which started
negotiating a new contract
early this month. Staffing is a
central issue.
Kim Stewart, another ER
nurse at Kaiser Sunnyside, said
there’s no bigger priority.
“Kaiser has a great patient
care model,” Stewart said. “But
without the people there to do
it right, it doesn’t work. I don’t
even want more money or
more benefits. I just want staff.”
Lail, the Providence Port-
land nurse who recently went
on leave, echoes those senti-
ments. He is a steward in his
union, the Oregon Nurses As-
sociation, which recently filed
a grievance with Providence
over staffing issues that was
signed by 75% of its nursing
staff.
Lail doesn’t know what his
future has in store. “I don’t
want to quit, I don’t want to
leave. But it’s getting really
hard,” he said. “The money is
really not that important to
me. I just want the support and
the right co-workers to do my
job.”
ment — and the Forest Service
for national forests.
Wyden said Congress
should increase the amount
of money available for the
Forest Service to reduce haz-
ardous-fuel buildups in na-
tional forests. Oregon itself
has about 2 million acres eligi-
ble for treatment. Wyden said
Forest Service chief Chris-
tiansen estimates it will take
$20 billion to eliminate the
backlog.
Wyden also is promoting
the creation of a 21st cen-
tury equivalent of the Civilian
Conservation Corps, the New
Deal-era agency that put pri-
marily young and unmarried
men to work in the nation’s
forests between 1933 and 1942.
Silver Falls State Park, east of
Salem, is one of the CCC’s leg-
acies in Oregon.
e
pwong@pamplinmedia.com