SAN ANTONIO – One manufacturing facility is responsible for a large portion of saline for medical providers across the United States. Due to Hurricane Helene, that facility was having trouble making enough saline.
Saline is the clear liquid used in an IV when a person gets dialysis treatments, goes through chemotherapy, surgery and sometimes during an emergency room visit.
However, when Hurricane Helene hit the East Coast, destroying homes and roads, the flooding from the storm also destroyed a major manufacturer’s ability to produce saline for IVs. That East Coast manufacturer was forced to close.
University Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Bryan Alsip is one of many doctors who had to adjust to a new normal.
“A company called Baxter had a plant for manufacturing IV fluids,” Alsip said. “They manufacture out of that plant almost half of the fluid supply for hospitals in the United States. … University Health, the Methodist system, Baptist system, [Brooke Army Medical Center] and I believe even the VA all relied on Baxter products. So, all of us really had to come up with some measures to conserve our supply.”
Alsip said San Antonio hospitals collaborated with plans to move forward with a fraction of the saline they normally have at their use.
“The direction for Baxter was for the foreseeable future,” Alsip said. “We would only expect to receive perhaps 60% of our normal allocation."
In an effort to continue performing surgeries, University Health found other ways to work around the shortage.
“Rather than automatically giving a patient an IV, if they can take fluids orally, if they’re otherwise stable and they don’t have a really acute situation, we’ve been very effective at using just oral hydration in many of those patients,” Alsip said. “That allowed us to really preserve the IV fluids for the ones who would need those.”
Alsip described how vital it was to keep IVs available for people who are critically ill in the Intensive Care Units, people in the emergency department and those in the emergency room.
“We’re not out of the woods. You know, this happened very early in October,” Alsip said. “And so, we’ve been dealing with this now for about two months.”
University Health expects to order IV fluids from its supplier at full capacity by the end of 2024.