Crisis standards of care have been talked about throughout the pandemic, and in New Mexico it was first enacted in December 2020.Fast forward to October 2021, and hospitals are back in the direst situation for hospitals.Dr. David Scrase said not all hospitals will be in crisis standards of care. “The state is not closing down medically necessary procedures but we are saying to hospitals if you get to the point where true care rationing is happening then you have to suspend those,” Scrase said.When it comes to the patients at our hospitals UNMH sent us a statement saying, "University of New Mexico Hospital continues to see a high census. We continue to have a high patient volume, in part due to patients who delayed or deferred care during the earlier stages of the pandemic." “Our ICUs have been greater than 100% utilization as a state for weeks and weeks now. Probably four or five weeks,” Scrase said.As of yesterday, hospitals showed the reality of ICU bed availability. “I think we're at the worst we have been with only 11 ICU beds,” Scrase said. Scrase said by Tuesday, those beds are likely full over at Presbyterian Hospital.A statement from Dr. Jason Mitchell the Chief Medical Officer at Presbyterian said, “As of this morning, we have 100 patients with COVID-19 in our hospitals statewide, of which 27 are in ICU." According to NMDOH statewide there are 87 regular beds available. “What we're trying to do right now is trying to push people who would normally need ICU care down into regular bed care,” Scrase said.At Lovelace Hospital, Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Vesta Sandoval said, “It certainly feels a bit different this time around… These are patients that are presenting with heart attacks and trauma patients and patients with all other types of illness that are coming to the hospitals.”Although the state has enacted crisis standards of care, Lovelace is not implementing them right now.“Basically, this is urgent, emergent and nonessential surgery. So they will be evaluating who these patients have an urgent need for, an emergent need,” Sandoval said. Regardless of crisis standards of care doctors want to make sure people don't delay care. “We want to continue medically necessary procedures. It's very important to maintain and prevent more problems down the line,” Sandoval said.At Lovelace, the staff says the worst-case scenario will happen if people do not get vaccines“If people don't get their flu vaccine they don't get the COVID vaccine and we experience another surge we really will be in trouble. We do not have enough beds to really be able to manage another large surge of either COVID or flu,” Sandoval said.