Baker Issuing Mask Advisory, Calling National Guard Up

Chris Lisinski

With health care providers facing a critical workforce shortage amid a spike in COVID-19 cases, the Baker administration on Tuesday will instruct Massachusetts hospitals to postpone or cancel all non-essential elective procedures likely to admit patients and will activate up to 500 National Guard personnel to help staff facilities in need. Gov. Charlie Baker also plans to announce an updated mask advisory that will recommend, but not require, all residents cover their faces indoors regardless of vaccination status, the Department of Public Health announced in a press release ahead of Baker’s 9 a.m. press conference at the State House.

As many as 300 of the Guard personnel will begin training this week to support 55 acute care hospitals and 12 ambulance service providers, DPH said. They will be deployed starting Dec. 27 to roles including non-emergency transport between facilities, observation of patients at risk of harming themselves, security, food service, and transporting patients inside hospitals.

New DPH guidance to hospitals will also take effect Dec. 27 ordering facilities to cancel or reschedule any “non-essential, non-urgent scheduled procedure” likely to result in inpatient admission, excluding individual specialty hospitals and facilities that maintain at least 15 percent availability in their medical-surgical and intensive care unit beds.

Massachusetts hospitals are currently operating at more than 90 percent of inpatient capacity despite previous steps to reduce non-essential and non-urgent scheduled procedures, and the state has 500 fewer acute care beds available as it did in January because of “unprecedented staffing shortages,” Bureau of Health Care Safety and Quality Director Elizabeth Kelley wrote in a memo to hospital CEOs. The steps come amid a substantial increase in confirmed COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations for the virus in recent weeks, driven in part by spread of the omicron variant.