How Hospitals Can Stay Ahead of the Summer Surge

Most hospitals talk about “surge season” in the context of winter respiratory viruses, but summer brings its own version, and it tends to be harder to plan around. A slew of unrelated pressures arrive at the same time, compound each other, and are intensifying year over year. The result is a quarter that can stretch staff, equipment, and operations, but without the same attention and planning that flu season gets.

The Many Pressures Hospitals Face Each Summer

There’s no telling in advance which pressures any given hospital will see in a given summer, or in what combination. They’re all reasonably likely, hard to predict individually, and difficult to plan around once they hit. What shows up can also depend a lot on where a hospital sits: for example, a tourist town on a lake may see a handful of boating accidents or near-drownings, a desert facility may brace for more heat stroke, while a coastal hospital has to prepare for hurricanes. 

Despite the variation, a handful of pressures show up across most hospitals in one form or another from June to September:

Heat events.
Climate change is driving longer and more intense heat waves, and heat-related ICU admissions are rising year over year. The CDC recorded nearly 120,000 ED visits for heat-related illness in 2023, with 92% of them occurring between May and September. Given the upward trend in summer temperatures, those numbers are likely to keep growing.

Outdoor activity injuries.
Summer means the sun is out and people are outdoors, off work, and on vacation. Kids are out of school and on bikes, trampolines, and playgrounds, while adults are boating, riding motorcycles, and grilling. Holiday weekends in particular bring fireworks, alcohol, and long drives. The combination of all these factors means admissions climb with a mix of burns, near-drownings, head injuries, and orthopedic trauma, all on top of normal census.

Vector-borne diseases.
A vector-borne disease is one transmitted to humans by a living carrier, usually a tick or mosquito. Summer is when these carriers are most active and when people spend the most time outside in the environments where they live: wooded areas, tall grass, standing water, and backyards at sunset. That combination drives a predictable seasonal climb in cases of things like Lyme disease and West Nile virus.

Severe weather and air quality.
Hurricane season begins June 1 and routinely forces evacuations, surge transfers from sister facilities, and supply chain delays. In addition, wildfire smoke drives respiratory admissions hundreds of miles from the fire itself, often with little warning.

PTO season.
Experienced staff take their longest vacations in the same window when census climbs and patient acuity shifts. Even when PTO is submitted months in advance, the resulting coverage gaps are hard to plan around when census and acuity are both moving.

The July 1 workforce reset.
New residents, new graduate nurses, and rotating fellows all start within days of each other. Whether or not the “July effect” shows up in mortality data (the research is mixed), the workforce realignment is real and the disruption is consistent and predictable.

Four Moves That Keep Units Steady Under Pressure

Summer’s unpredictability is itself fairly predictable. Hospitals know a surge is coming, even if they can’t say exactly which week the heat wave hits or which weekend brings a wave of trauma. The advantage goes to the units that have the right systems in place before the pressure arrives.

The four moves below cut across every layer of the unit: managers spend less time chasing gaps, staff have more support to lean on, and patients feel the difference in care that stays consistent even when the census is high.

Make every asset findable, especially for staff who are new.

When a unit’s most experienced nurses are on vacation and the newer ones are still learning where things live, time spent searching for an IV pump or a working monitor adds up fast. Asset management gives any staff member, on any shift, the same real-time view of equipment location and availability. New residents and new grad RNs don’t have to learn a unit’s hiding spots to do their jobs, charge nurses don’t have to be the human inventory system, and patients don’t wait while staff hunt for the equipment their care depends on.

Make hand hygiene a base layer new staff can rely on.

Hand hygiene is often something experienced clinicians do without thinking about it, but new staff may not be there yet. A new resident or grad RN in their first weeks is juggling so much else: the unit’s layout, the EHR, the team, the patient population. With a thousand competing priorities, hand hygiene can easily slip down the priority list.

However, with electronic hand hygiene monitoring, compliance runs in the background as a base support layer they don’t have to actively manage. Real-time prompts at the point of care nudge them when they miss a moment, so the behavior gets reinforced as they build their routine rather than being something they have to remember on their own. Nurse managers get the same benefit from the other direction: a clear, real-time view that every clinician on the floor, however new, is keeping up with hand hygiene and keeping patients protected.

Keep rounding consistent when shifts get heavy.

Summer surges mean nurses are managing more patients at higher acuity, often while still learning the flow of the unit. Hourly rounding and bedside shift reports are exactly the routines that slip first when a shift gets busy, and the consequences (falls, pressure injuries, delayed call light responses) all show up later in HCAHPS scores.

But with features like the Rounding Monitor, charge nurses and bedside staff have a live, color-coded view of which rooms are overdue for rounds, so prioritization happens at a glance rather than from memory. For new clinicians especially, it takes the mental load of tracking who’s next off their plate and lets them focus on the patient in front of them. The rounds get done, patients stay safer, and the unit feels calmer even when census is high.

Keep rooms ready so high turnover doesn’t slow the unit down.

More admissions, transfers, and turnover are direct consequences of spikes in volume. The more patients moving in and out, the more often a charge nurse or manager has to verify that the next room is properly equipped, stocked, and configured. Plus, with every new admission or transfer, the question resets, and what was ready an hour ago may not be ready now.

But with features like Unit Readiness, leaders have a live view of which rooms are fully stocked, which ones are short, and where the missing equipment can be found. Staff don’t have to verify each room manually, and managers don’t have to chase down gaps every time a patient leaves. Rooms stay ready in real time, new staff don’t get stuck on prep work that should already be done, and the unit can absorb higher volume without losing its footing.

Staying Ahead of the Surge

The compounding nature of summer pressure is exactly what makes a connected data layer worth investing in. Asset visibility, workflow insight, and hand hygiene compliance data are useful on a calm Tuesday in April. But they become indispensable when a heat wave, a trauma surge, a PTO-thinned roster, and a class of new residents all hit on the same Monday morning in July.

Hospitals that plan for the stack, rather than each pressure individually, are the ones whose summers look manageable from the inside. When every staff member, new or experienced, has the tools to do their job well, the unit holds together through the busiest weeks, and patients are the ones who ultimately feel the difference.