West TN Healthcare leadership shares open letter

By West Tennessee Healthcare Leadership, Special to the State Gazette

On Monday, August 23, the following open letter was released by the Leadership of West Tennessee Healthcare to the community:

Dear West Tennesseans,

Today, (August 23) the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and will now be marketed as Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee), for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older. The vaccine also continues to be available under emergency use authorization (EUA), including for individuals 12 through 15 years of age and for the administration of a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals.

As the region’s largest healthcare system, providing the highest levels of specialized care during this pandemic, we are pleading for the public to get vaccinated against COVID-19. We are taking care of some of the highest numbers of COVID-19 patients in the state of Tennessee, and the majority of our hospitalized patients (>90%) are unvaccinated.

Our healthcare team members are exhausted, saddened and frustrated that our communities are not taking simple steps to aid in this crisis. Like the hospitals in Middle Tennessee and in the Shelby County area, we are seeing increasing numbers of hospitalizations in all of our facilities and have been operating in surge capacity, but our ICU beds and staff are limited resources.

The number of patients in our facilities threatens to overwhelm our healthcare system, and we need your help in fighting a war – a war against a virus for which there is a tool to fight it – the vaccine.

Please know that we are doing all that we can to support and serve our communities, but we desperately need your help. If you have questions about the vaccine, please contact your physician or a healthcare provider that you trust. We believe the vaccine is safe and effective and even though you might still get COVID-19 if you are vaccinated, the chance of becoming seriously ill, becoming hospitalized or even dying is very low. If you have been vaccinated already, we thank you!

We have served the region for seventy-one years, taking care of the most serious conditions, like heart attacks and strokes, and cancer, and we want to continue to do so. However, in this environment, our ability to continue to do so and provide the best care possible is compromised when our hospitals are full of COVID-19 patients. We know that this can be prevented.

Please stand behind our healthcare workers, and help protect our communities’ access to quality healthcare in this time of need. We need your help to save lives – NOW!

Sincerely,

The Leadership of West Tennessee Healthcare