By Devon Green

Vice President of Government Relations

Happy crossover! Last week, we reached the theoretical halfway point of the legislative session. I say theoretical because with the latest federal COVID-19 relief/stimulus package, the legislative calendar may extend beyond mid-May or legislators may come back in the fall. Regardless, the crossover deadline remained—meaning that all bills not involving money had to be passed out of legislative committees to stay alive. Any bills not passing out of committees on Friday are left “on the wall” and the legislature will have to wait until next year to take them up again.

“We cannot be paralyzed by anxiety, but we can’t be lulled into complacency.”

Those words have guided Dr. Trey Dobson and the Southwestern Vermont Medical Center through a year unlike any other. The COVID-19 pandemic officially reached Vermont on March 7, 2020, when the state Department of Health announced that an adult patient was being treated for the coronavirus at SVMC.

In the year since, 1,480 residents of Bennington County have developed COVID-19, and nine have died. Statewide, the death toll is 207, with nearly 16,000 cases recorded.

The disease’s arrival on Bennington’s doorstep resulted in a ripple of anxiety that had already begun to reverberate across the country: would there be enough protective equipment and ventilators to go around?

That anxiety was simultaneously being realized abroad, as Italian hospitals overflowed and the virus began popping up in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Protecting SVMC’s staff was the first priority for Dobson, who reasoned that his staff couldn’t reasonably maintain the capacity to care for the community through a crisis if they weren’t also cared for in turn. The classic, “put your oxygen mask on before helping others” approach.

During a call-in show with health care providers from Rutland Regional Medical Center, many of the questions were about safety and the availability of a third vaccine that requires one shot instead of two.

The Rutland hospital’s Dr. Rick Hildebrant, chief medical information officer and director of hospital medicine, and Amy Martone, a registered nurse and director of nursing excellence, spent an hour answering questions about vaccines from callers and Mike Cameron, Catamount Radio news director.

Hildebrant said he and Martone wanted to tell people the vaccines are very effective.

“We have not seen any cases of individuals who have been vaccinated and who have contracted COVID,” he said.

Martone said since Rutland Regional has moved its vaccine clinics to the Holiday Inn, they have been able to administer up to 800 shots a day.

“I’m just so very proud of that, that we’re able to do that for the community,” Martone said.

The bill, S. 30, has been replaced with a “strike-all amendment” that bans firearms from hospitals and charters a study by the Capitol Complex Security Advisory Committee on the regulation of firearms in the complex. The study will look at situations when people have brought firearms onto the property, how those incidents were handled, and whether the issue should be addressed in legislation.

About seven years ago, the leadership team at Southwestern Vermont Medical Center realized, because of dwindling numbers of people being admitted as patients, they were going to need to rethink the hospital’s staffing system.

Inpatient care, a main source of revenue for many hospitals at the time, have been declining for years. SVMC flipped from 80% inpatient and 20% outpatient in 2000 to 79% outpatient and 21% inpatient in 2014.

The downturn could have spurred the hospital to cut staff, but instead, it redeployed nurses who previously cared for patients in the hospital to new programs.

Those initiatives have helped SVMC reduce unnecessary hospitalizations by more than half.