BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - As hospitals are inundated with covid patients, they are trying to make more room for them.

But one thing standing in the way is oxygen.

“At this point we’re sending most of the covid patients who required hospitalization home on oxygen,” Amy Giarrusso with Our Lady of the Lake said.

Oxygen concentrators like these provided by dura-med are given to patients to use at home.

“We don’t anticipate it that they’ll need it for a long time, they may need it for a week or two to get them through their recovery period,” Giarrusso said.

But if they can’t get the supplies patients to need, they have to stay at the hospital longer.

“The hospital provides oxygen while you’re here and we contract out with DME companies to provide that supply at home,” Giarrusso said.

When the patient is cleared to stop using oxygen, the company issuing the supplies comes and picks it up.

Sean Kelley with Duramed said they’ve been working non-stop to get oxygen supplies to and from hospitals.

“I go in the hospitals, I go all the way up to the floors, like say if it was the patients on the fourth floor, I go to the fourth-floor nurses’ station, I find a nurse that’s for that patient’s room, and I instruct her how to use the equipment if she doesn’t know how to use it already,” Kelley said.

The nurses then verify that the patient going home with the oxygen concentrator knows how to use it.

Duramed said check-in with their users when they are home.

Because of the surge in covid cases, officials said they need people to return their equipment as soon as they’re done with it.

“Basically, what they do is they get a doctor’s order for a script to be picked up, and then we’ll go out and pick it up,” Kelley said.

All you have to do to return your supplies is call the company that issued it.

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