Administrators at both OCH Regional Medical Center and Mississippi State University have been in contact as MSU has resumed in-person classes, but OCH CEO Jim Jackson said he does not foresee the hospital having to admit any students who test positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus.
OCH has treated a couple of students for the virus in the emergency room but has not admitted any for treatment, and the hospital should be able to handle the increased population of the area now that in-person classes have resumed for the first time since March, Jackson said.
“If a student does require admission, they’ll probably be going to their hometowns, but it would be rare for a student in that age group to require admission,” he said.
The hospital had six positive COVID-19 patients as of Tuesday morning, Jackson told the OCH Board of Trustees at its monthly meeting. Some ventilators have been malfunctioning recently, and OCH will return two ventilators to MSU and buy two more next month, most likely with funds from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) Act, he said.
The board voted unanimously to defer a scholarship for pre-med MSU students for a year and to decrease a regular contribution to The TRUST, a private investment group within the Golden Triangle Development LINK. Jackson said these decisions were meant to save the hospital some money in light of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic.
Operating expenses for the first ten months of the fiscal year exceeded $57.2 million, Chief Financial Officer Susan Russell said. The board will approve the hospital’s fiscal year 2021 budget in September.
Additionally, OCH and other hospitals in northeast Mississippi are in the early stages of forming a “regional collaborative” to ensure all COVID-19 patients can be treated somewhere in the region, Jackson said. OCH has a shared document with several facilities, including Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle in Columbus and North Mississippi Medical Center in West Point and Tupelo, to keep each other aware of how many beds they have available, he said.
OCH hopes to expand the network to include hospitals in the Delta, which have been sending patients to OCH recently, Jackson said.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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