Nurses and staff working at the Doctor’s Hospital at Renaissance COVID facility in Edinburg have come forward to shed a light on the abhorrent patient conditions in the make-shift facility that include PPE being hidden from staff, ants crawling all over incapacitated patients, corpses in non-air conditioned rooms next to medical equipment, and at least one incident where a patient died after he suffered from hypoxia when staff accidentally attempted to provide him with oxygen on an empty tank.
A collection of these reports were released on Twitter by user Sarah, RN (@shesinscrubs) who claims to be a nurse based in Florida who does not work at the facility but “assisting in blowing the whistle on the conditions of (the) facility.”
The thread of tweets paint a picture of a critically understaffed, under-supplied, and unprepared facility. (WARNING: GRAPHIC DETAILS AND IMAGES)
This thread will be about the abhorrent conditions at the covid “hospital” DHR put up in McAllenTexas. Staff have walked out of this facility because of the conditions in which there are literally ants crawling over critically ill patients. Hiding PPE from staff.
— Sarah, RN (@shesinscrubs) July 19, 2020
What makes these reports so much more egregious is that, even in the face of such incredibly abhorrent conditions, DHR’s main medical facility has not been leveraged to assist with these patients. Back in March, DHR spent $9 million to convert their hospice center into a COVID-19 facility. The purpose of this conversion was, at first, clear considering the highly contagious nature of the virus. However, a few staff members from the COVID facility have recently stated that the reason why DHR is refusing to use their main hospital is so that they can continue to allow the hospital to be open for elective procedures.
This was actually confirmed by a recent report by the New York Times.
Krucial is a medical staffing agency that has previously played a role in helping with surge staffing in New York City earlier this year. In light of the conditions that their staff is currently working under at DHR’s COVID facility, Krucial has made it clear that staff will be terminated if they reach out to the press regarding the conditions.
To date, DHR’s solid wall of administrators as well as it’s owner, Alonzo Cantu (who, ironically, was selected to be on Govorner Abbott’s re-open Texas council), have not responded to the allegations of their facilities’ gross mismanagement. To date, their facilities are still performing elective procedures and not utilizing their main hospital to help their own COVID facility.
Recently, DHR and other local hospitals have brought in refrigerated trucks to temporarily house corpses which can only lead one to believe that they expect more deaths in the next few weeks. However, I don’t think I want to ponder on how many of those deaths could have been prevented had DHR not acted as callously to turn a quick buck.
It’s one thing to say they were not prepared, but what has transpired at DHR and their COVID facility is borderline criminal.
