Appropriate Hospital Beds

However, that is not always possible because their in-network hospital may not have a bed available. I have to make sure that all the outpatient providers are in-network with the insurance as well otherwise it will not be covered by the insurance and the patient will not be able to afford the cost of care. I thought having a hospitalist and working closely with the Kaiser case manager to address discharge planning needs helped maintain care quality and contain the cost of care. Successful discharge planning that reduces readmissions are high priority issues addressed in the healthcare reform agenda because it affects both quality and cost of care (Weiss et al., 2015). Weiss et al. (2015) also stated that "...hospitalized patients, regardless of risk status or the setting to which they are being discharged, require some

Although, there does appear to be some inherent waste associated with the way inpatient beds are counted. The answer

Hospitals are competing for these patients to justify the continuation of the labor-intensive and expensive program. Both hospitals have the ability to accommodate six patients but hardly reach their full capacity.

The hospital is currently utilizing 71.43% of their beds, this is actually an ideal operating point. To increase its rate of utilization might decrease the service quality.

For a long period of time, hospitals have basically been established as nonprofit and for-profit facilities with several similarities and differences between these categories. Notably, these categories have minimal differences though it's difficult to predict their quality based on their structures. The healthcare field has also been characterized by several trends in the past three decades in attempts to improve the delivery of services and patient outcomes. In relation to the provision of long-term care, hospitals and nursing homes have different roles that enable them to achieve this objective. The hospital sector in the United States has experienced several changes that have contributed to its current state of long-term care policy.

Significant health disparities between rural and urban populations have been a major concern in the United States. One prominent factor contributing to the disparities is lack of access to quality care in rural areas which is closely associated with challenges faced by rural health care providers (National Rural Health Association, 2007). Rural hospitals are the key health care provider in rural areas, offering essential health care services to nearly 54 million people (American Hospital Association, 2006). They face a series of challenges such as workforce shortages, rise in health care costs, difficulty in finding access to capital, difficulty in

A huge effect of boarding patients/overcrowding emergency departments is ambulance diversion. It occurs when a hospital ED cannot accommodate any more emergency patients so

Approximately half of a million Americans are homeless, living in shelters or on the streets at any one time (Galea & Vlahov, 2002). The homeless population utilizes the emergency room to gain access to, primary care, nutritional, pharmaceutical and basic needs with non-medical issues is a contributing factor to emergency room overcrowding. The non-medical can primary care component needs to be moved out of the acute care setting of the emergency room but still readily accessible to the homeless clients.

inflow of patients is higher than the available beds. You are treating an elderly man who is breathless and cyanosed. While you assess whether he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or heart failure, he becomes drowsy and starts gasping. You quickly intubate him with some difficulty, prolonging his period of hypoxia, and put him on ventilator support. You then get a phone call from a senior consultant in the hospital that an important social activist is about to arrive with chest pain and will need to be admitted. You are directed to

You are an IT Director at a medium-sized urban hospital with 160 beds and 1,500 associates. You are a full-service hospital with a typical list of departments to include multiple ICUs, mother & baby, emergency services, radiology, oncology, surgery, etc. You are considering a new EMR application because the vendor of your current EMR has lost market share, failed to pass meaningful use attestation, and is losing market share with unpredictable future stability state. You are considering a cloud solution as the potential network architecture & strategy.

Develop a similar room-occupancy table to show the effects of adding operations on Saturday. (Assume that30 operations would still be performed each day.) How would this affect the utilization of the bed capacity? Isthere sufficient capacity for the additional patients?

Emergency room overcrowding is a major issue throughout not just the United States but in many countries. There have been many strategies on how to combat this issue as patient satisfaction is often being a major variable on hospitals being reimbursed, which interventions are most helpful? One intervention that is gaining more and more popularity is advertising wait times. Through a PICO search with key words of “ED triage” and “patient satisfaction” or “wait times” provided some great original research over the past five years that has been peer reviewed in the Journal of Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. While multiple research papers came up, the methodology and potential of taking this particular study further was of great interest.

My placement at Queen Elizabeth II Hospital – Ward 3A has been full of great opportunities for learning.

Without expanding the facilities and increasing the number of employees, this higher capacity is likely to be insufficient for additional patients.

Health care systems across the world are facing a number of challenges, which include changing patterns of diseases, a shortage of health care professionals, inaccessibility of services, and insufficient resources. Given that an increasing population creates a greater demand for healthcare services, the shortage of hospital beds due to high admission rates and increased length of stay are some of the challenges that the healthcare system of Saudi Arabia is struggling to overcome. The Saudi Arabian government funds 244 hospitals that have a capacity of 33,277 beds (Almalki, Fitzgerald, & Clark, 2011). However, there was a forecast of bed capacity shows that, by 2013, the healthcare system in Saudi Arabia will require about 14,700 additional beds to meet the increasing demand for healthcare services (RNCOS, 2011). The shortage of beds implies that the healthcare system needs to formulate ways of increasing hospital bed capacity. The problem being investigated is the Saudi Arabian hospital bed shortage due to increased length of stay in hospitals by patients with chronic illnesses, the elderly, and the disabled. The purposes of the proposed study are to describe the post-acute care needs and also the need for effective discharge planning.