Mississippi Today
Mississippi hospitals see rising occupancy rates over last four years
Mississippi hospitals are fuller than they were four years ago, according to data collected by the federal government between March 2020 and April 2024.
Hospitals with over 250 licensed beds saw a 7.6% increase in average annual occupancy rates, or the percentage of staffed beds filled with patients, from 73.1% in 2020 to 80.7% in 2024.
A shortage of health care workers, which limits the number of beds a hospital is able to open, is one factor that contributes to high occupancy rates.
“Our staffing hasn’t rebounded since COVID,” said Kim Hoover, interim president and CEO of the Mississippi Hospital Association. “… Unfortunately there are some beds that are there but they’re not available because there aren’t staff there.”
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The nursing shortage is the primary factor limiting hospital bed availability, she said.
Only 37.2% of registered nurses in Mississippi work in a hospital setting. Hospital registered nurse (RN) position vacancies skyrocketed to 3,038 statewide in 2022, according to a Mississippi Hospital Association survey in which 82% of Mississippi hospitals responded.
Hoover, who is a registered nurse, cited heavy workloads, a desire for regular working hours and higher pay as reasons nurses choose to seek work elsewhere.
She said staffing shortages can lead to burnout and impose restrictions on the support nurses are able to provide to patients. “It’s difficult to be able to spend time with the family and the patient,” she said. “…Sometimes there are opportunities that we just don’t get to take.”
Some hospitals have responded to staffing challenges by offering sign-on bonuses, more flexible hours and pay incentives. Alicia Carpenter, director of marketing for Merit Health Central, said the hospital has worked to ensure that its pay is competitive and has launched a loan repayment program for employees.
In the past year, “nursing retention has substantially and measurably increased,” she said.
Nationwide, hospital turnover rates have declined 2% from 2022 to 2023, according to a report from NSI Nursing Solutions Inc., a national nurse recruiting firm.
Several large hospitals saw declines in the average number of staffed beds by over 30% during that period, including Delta Health System – The Medical Center in Greenville, Merit Health Central in Jackson and Singing River Health System in Pascagoula.
North Mississippi Medical Center, the second largest hospital in the state with 640 licensed beds, averaged 387 staffed beds in 2020. From 2021 to 2023, the hospital’s average staffed beds dropped below 300 – less than half of the hospital’s licensed bed capacity.
In the first four months of 2024, the Tupelo hospital’s capacity rebounded to an average of 345 beds.
North Mississippi Medical Center declined to comment for this story. Delta Health System – The Medical Center did not respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stopped requiring hospitals to report capacity and occupancy data on May 3, ending provisions intended to track COVID-19 pandemic data. Hospitals can opt to continue voluntary reporting.
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Occupancy rates may also be impacted by hospital closures or reduced patient services and an aging population.
Forty-five rural hospitals in the state – or 62% – have already experienced losses in patient services, according to an April 2024 study from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. More than half of Mississippi’s rural hospitals are at risk of closing, according to the same report.
When rural hospitals close or reduce services, transfer volumes balloon at large urban hospitals, said Dan Woods, St. Dominic’s Hospital senior director of emergency services and throughput.
St. Dominic’s averages 4,000 to 5,000 transfers from other hospitals annually.
“When one goes down, we all kind of carry the burden,” he said.
St. Dominic’s often accepts stroke patients transferred from other hospitals to its Comprehensive Stroke Center. Wood said the center sees about 175 patients presenting signs of a stroke each month.
“That’s a huge volume of patients that are coming in,” Wood said. “And we’re going to see that number grow as rural hospitals continue to struggle.”
Wood said that Mississippi’s aging population also contributes to higher hospital occupancy rates. Geriatric patients are more likely to have more comorbidities like hypertension, diabetes or obesity.
Mississippi’s older population is increasing. Between 2010 and 2021, the state saw a 29.3% increase in adults over 65.
“The nursing shortage is not going away and will continue to grow with a higher aging population demand,” said Ashley Butsch, public relations manager for Singing River Medical Center.
“I expect to see occupancy rates incline for everybody,” Wood said.
Hoover said that she is hopeful that collaboration between hospitals could be the key to mitigating the staffing and occupancy challenges Mississippi hospitals face.
The organization is working on developing a health information exchange platform to transmit real time hospital data to facilities statewide. Hoover said she hopes the program, called IntelliTrue, will roll out before next spring.
Currently, hospitals share occupancy data with the Mississippi Department of Health once each day, but that information can quickly become out of date.
Because there is no statewide, continuously updated data hub, hospital staff must call other institutions to facilitate a patient transfer.
“Sometimes they’ll call five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 people and … they say, ‘well, we don’t have a bed,’” said Hoover.
The new program will allow hospitals to share real time capacity information.
Hoover acknowledged that while the system will not help with staffing shortages, it will allow patients to be more seamlessly transferred to facilities with the capacity to treat them.
“It’s better for us to care for our folks here in the state of Mississippi,” Hoover said. “So the goal really is, to be able to keep all of our patients in Mississippi so they can stay in their community as much as possible.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1966
Sept. 19, 1966
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to a mass meeting in Grenada, Mississippi, followed by a march. The news came after 300 members of the white community had called for “an end to violence.”
The next morning, King, along with Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and folk singer Joan Baez, led African-American students to the newly integrated public school. A week earlier, a white mob had attacked Black students and those escorting them. The battered and bloodied victims escaped to nearby Bellflower Baptist Church.
After a federal judge ordered troopers to protect the children, FBI agents arrested 13 white men. Despite the order, the harassment of black students continued, and they eventually walked out in protest. Two months later, a federal judge ordered the school system to treat everyone equally regardless of race.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) — A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 — a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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