Boston hospitals battle to keep things running during winter storms as they struggle with shortages of beds, linens and transportation, according to an article on the Boston Globe website.
Surgeries were canceled because there weren’t enough beds, taxis hired to ferry patients who had no other way home and stockpiles of linens were running so low that staff began rationing them.
Some managers at Mass. General went door-to-door on their drive into the city, picking up as many colleagues as their cars could handle, and other staffers slept overnight on mattresses in the hospital’s conference rooms because they worried they wouldn’t make it back in, the article said.
So many staffers ended up camped out that Boston Medical Center served more than 1,000 free lunches.
The commuting concerns at South Shore Hospital were not as much about hospital staff but on the workers at a Somerville company that cleans the facility’s linens. So many of the linen company’s employees didn’t make it to work that South Shore was worried about running out of clean sheets and towels.
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