Here in New York, Gov. Cuomo is ordering hospitals to increase “managed bed capacity” by 25-50%. I’m wondering how exactly.
Some guesses:
Cancel elective surgery and turn all those recovery room beds into “managed beds”.
Assign nurses to ER beds and make people stay in the ER.
***edit: I was trying to make a joke with this one. Come to find out I’m not funny***
Tell women to stop having babies (not so sure about this one)
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Build actual new capacity in a tent outside in the parking lot.
We are creeping up in some critical capacity thresholds and it seems like a simple solution to just say “increase capacity”. How can we do it in on such short notice?
Thanks!
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It has to do with licensing. A hospital may be licensed to have 100 beds. By normal regulations, that’s how many patients that hospital can safely and efficiently handle with supplies and personnel. Any more than 100 patients, and they will start transferring patients somewhere else, or diverting ambulances to other nearby hospitals. It’s important to note that a bed in terms of capacity is not the same as the number of actual hospital beds in the building. For capacity purposes, a “bed” is the IV machine, heart/vitals monitor, oxygen, an actual bed, a nurse, etc.
Increasing the bed capacity 25% means that the 100 bed hospital can now have 125 patients. You hit the nail on the head with some of the ways hospitals may choose to accomplish this (except the pregnant woman thing). The hospital likely already has a few extra beds (just the bed) around anyway, and can improvise to add more. They’ll likely defer elective procedures to expand their capacity as well.
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