Of Hospitals and Nursing Homes
Oooh, a little local news! Covered internationally… don’t we feel special!
The Hamilton Spectator reports about hospitals starting to charge inpatients if a nursing home bed is available, but they refuse to go because it is not their first choice.
The article is surprisingly balanced on the issue; from the medical side, I can certainly say this is a big issue. As a PGY-1 who has just rotated through emerg and internal medicine, the problem is pretty clear — There are insufficient nursing homes, so a good proportion of beds on hospital wards are filled with patients awaiting long term care beds. These are patients who are otherwise stable medically, but for whatever reason (dementia, physical disability, etc.) cannot be cared for by themselves or their family, and thus need a nursing home. As the Spectator article points out, waiting times for nursing homes can be months to years.
So the patient stays in hospital, at enormous taxpayer expense, which prevents that bed from being used to admit patients from Emergency or to care for post-operative patients. So for the people working in Emergency, half their beds are filled with patients who need to stay in hospital for some time, are admitted, but there are no beds up on the floor to hold them. This slows down the ER workflow and contributes to the 4+ hour waiting time in the ER.
The best solution would probably be to open more high quality nursing homes…
(via Kevin, M.D.)
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