Emergency Department Boarding Stories

Our county's Emergency Medical Services reduced our ability to go on diversion down to 200 hours max for the month of October. Diversion is when paramedics bypass our hospital to take patients with heart attacks and strokes to other hospitals and is the only mechanism we have to offset ED overcrowding due to inpatient boarding. Removing this ability means patients will continue to arrive despite all beds being occupied with admitted patients thereby forcing us to care for these patients in areas such as ambulance ramps and public hallway spaces.

We are essentially disrobing patients in public spaces in order to care for them.

Therefore, we are essentially disrobing patients in public spaces in order to care for them. All this because of inpatients boarding in the ED. Basically the ED is the largest inpatient unit in the hospital. Patients are receiving bills for two or three days of inpatient care but never actually arrive upstairs to an inpatient space. Someone needs to find out why inpatients are not able to be discharged to skilled nursing facilities.