‘Hallway medicine’ seen as a way to unclutter ERs

By Carla K. Johnson
Houston Chronicle/AP
October 26, 2008

It may not sound like ideal health care, but hospital officials nationwide are being urged to consider hallway medicine as a way to ease emergency department crowding, and some are trying it.

Leading the way is Stony Brook University Medical Center at Stony Brook, N.Y., where a study found that no harm was caused by moving emergency room patients to upper-floor hallways when they were ready for admission.

Holding patients in ERs can cause deaths, doctors say. In a 2007 survey of nearly 1,500 emergency doctors, 13 percent said they personally experienced a patient dying as a result of boarding in the emergency department. The survey was conducted by the American College of Emergency Physicians.

The new study found slightly fewer deaths and intensive care unit admissions in the hallway patients, compared with the standard bed patients. That was no surprise… because the protocol calls for giving the first available rooms to the sickest patients. Intensive care patients never go to hallways.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/health/6079406.html

The United States has 2.9 hospital beds per 1000 individuals. The median number of beds for OECD nations is 3.7 (OECD, 2002). Not only do we have fewer beds, the distribution is less even than in other nations with their more egalitarian systems. The supply of beds tends to be quite adequate in affluent regions, but is inadequate in other areas, especially those served by safety-net institutions.

In many hospitals, emergency departments have had to accept queues in “holding” – patients who have been admitted but for whom there are no beds available on the hospital floors. When the holding area is full, it has been common practice to admit patients to the hallways of the various services, not as policy but as a temporary inconvenience. The significance of this study is that hallway admissions now are being recommended as explicit hospital policy.

Hospitals also need policies to provide surge capacity – the ability to admit much larger numbers of patients in the event of major epidemics or catastrophic events. Can you imagine how these hospitals would respond to such a surge in patients? Not very well.

How is it that we have lower capacity and worse distribution of our hospital beds than do other nations that spend much less on health care than we do? Quite simply, they use equitable, egalitarian systems for health care financing and health system planning. Of course, this is code language for stating that they depend on government involvement in their financing and health system planning.

Other nations do sometimes have queues, especially for less urgent problems, often labeled as rationing. So their systems are not perfect. Some merely need to spend more money, and others need to replace their public stewards with individuals who have more egalitarian values.

In the United States, we spend more than enough money, primarily on those with the means to pay, and they get good care (except for an excess of detrimental high-tech services).

In contrast, for less affluent individuals, we do not even supply them with enough beds. But at least we don’t ration. We merely hide them behind the curtains in the upstairs hallways.