Hospital board looks for the right message to encourage vaccinations

Members of the local hospital board kicked around ideas for messaging Wednesday night. The message is “get vaccinated.”
Along the way, members of the St. Mary Hospital Service District No. 2 board expressed frustration with the recent and steep rise in COVID-19 cases, the parish’s low vaccination rate and what they feel is social media misinformation about the coronavirus.
“It’s pretty tough to take, personally,” said Dr. William Cefalu, who chairs the board and practices at Ochsner St. Mary, the hospital owned by the board and operated by Ochsner Health System.
“When you run the engine at the red line long enough, it gets to be more than you can take.”
That engine has been repeatedly revved up by COVID surges in spring and summer 2020, the winter resurgence and now the rapidly spreading Delta COVID variant, which struck just as the most restrictive mitigation measures had faded away.
Now St. Mary, identified early last month as a Delta hot spot, has a rising number of COVID cases and a vaccination rate of 30.5%, below the state rate of about 42% and far below the 70% national rate.
Board members Heath Hoffpauir, Gary Stansbury, Kendra Thomas and Donald Stephens joined Cefalu in talking about ways to reach out through local TV, radio, this newspaper, social media and billboards, and exploring the idea of presenting information in Spanish and Vietnamese to reach those minority populations.
Meanwhile, Cefalu said, Ochsner St. Mary in Morgan City is running short on the ability to staff an adequate number of beds.
The hospital’s normal in-patient census would be about 20 people, Cefalu said. Occasionally, the number of patients would rise to 35.
“Now it’s twice that …,” Cefalu said.
“When they come in [with no COVID], it’s like a unicorn. Somebody came in with pneumonia and I was like ‘whoa.’ That’s the first time in a month.”
Acquiring nurses, especially nurses, is becoming difficult, he said. On top of the normal retirements and departures, there’s burnout from the long pandemic and the feeling that the latest wave could have been prevented, all in an environment in which the health care providers risk getting sick themselves.
“Everything is going against trying to provide the support staff and the doctors, really,” Cefalu said. “We’re on the brink of practicing medicine like a Third World country.”
After the meeting, Cefalu talked about why patients tell him they don’t want to get vaccinated.
“I’ve heard about everything,” he said.
Some people are worried about the speed with which COVID vaccines were developed. But no corners were cut, Cefalu said. He believes the evidence shows the vaccines are safe.
And “there’s a lot of distrust of government at the federal level,” Cefalu said.
A conversation between doctor and patient will usually persuade the patient to get vaccinated, he said. But that’s a 15 minute talk that the doctor may not have time for.
The Delta variant is “a monster,” Cefalu said during the meeting. “It’s a juggernaut. If you’re not vaccinated, you’re going to catch it. If you’re vaccinated, you might get it anyway.”
But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and State Health Officer Dr. Joseph Kanter have been assuring people that despite a relatively small number of break-through COVID cases — about 10% of new cases being reported by the Louisiana Office of Public Health are among vaccinated people — COVID vaccinations still offer the best protection against getting seriously ill or dying from the disease.