UPHS – Marquette holds Community Town Hall meeting

MARQUETTE COUNTY — The Michigan Nurses Association and the MGH RN Staff Council has released a statement addressing concerns about UP Health Systems-Marquette’s response and preparation for the COVID-19 crisis yesterday.

Now the hospital held an online Community Town Hall meeting this afternoon. The meeting began with letting people know that UPHS’s goal is to help patients and protect employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The hospital is also actively collaborating with all the hospitals in the U.P. to take a regional approach at dealing with this public health crisis. This will also involve taking the sickest patients and moving them from across the region to UPHS Marquette at some point in the future.

This does bring some concern, due to 100 nurses being sent home without pay. This decision was made to conserve personal protective equipment and decrease its burn rate. The hospital states that they do have a “strong supply” of PPE for their staff.

“The hospital has currently a strong supply of PPE for our staff and physicians,” said Gar Atchison, CEO-Marquette UPHS. “We are, like every hospital, are working to conserve the PPE and looking at how to reduce the burn rate. This led us to the decision to seize doing that on all elected procedures in the facility.”

To watch the full Community Town Hall meeting you can click here for the link.

To read the nurses original statement you can click here.