BackgroundWhen medical wards become saturated, the common practice is to resort to outlying patients in another ward until a bed becomes free.ObjectivesCompare the quality of care provided for inpatients who are outlying (O) in inappropriate wards because of lack of vacant beds in appropriate specialty wards to the care given to non outlying (NO) patients.MethodsWe propose a matched-pair cluster study. The exposed group consisted of inpatients that were outliers in inappropriate wards because of lack of available beds. Non-exposed subjects (the control group) were those patients who were hospitalized in the ward that corresponded to the reason for their admission. Each patient of the exposed group was matched to a specific control subject. The principal objective was to prospectively measure differences in the length of hospital stays, the secondary objectives were to assess mortality, rate of re-admission at 28 days, and rate of transfer into intensive care.Results238 were included in the NO group, 245 in the O group. More patients in the O group (86% vs 76%) were transferred into a ward with prescription completed. O patients remained in hospital for 8 days [4-15] vs 7 days [4-13] for NO patients (p = 0.04). 124 (52%) of the NO patients received heparin-based thromboembolic prevention during their stay in hospital vs 104 (42%) of the O patient group (p = 0.03). 66 (27%) O patients were re-admitted to hospital within 28 days vs 40 (17%) NO patients (p = 0.008).ConclusionO patients had a worse prognosis than NO patients.

Objective Emergency rooms play an important role by providing continuous access to healthcare 24 h a day, 7 days a week, but the lack of available hospital beds has become a major difficulty. Changing bed management policy could improve patient flow. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the consequences of a change in patient prioritisation on available beds. Methods The study consisted of a computerised bed management simulation based on day-by-day data collected from 1 to 31 January 2013 in a teaching hospital. Real hospital data were used to power the computer simulation. The scenarios tested were: (1) priority for emergency and surgery; (2) priority for emergency and medicine; (3) priority for planned admissions and surgery; and (4) priority for planned admissions and medicine. The results of these scenarios were compared with each other and to actual data. Results This study included 2347 patients. The scenario that proved to be the least efficient was the one that gave priority to emergency patients presenting with a medical condition. The scenario that exhibited the best efficiency was the one that gave priority to planned admissions and surgery. Conclusions Changing policies for hospital bed management is worth exploring to improve hospital patient flow and length of stay. What is known about the topic? The lack of available hospital beds is a major difficulty in managing patient flow in emergency rooms (ERs). The ER patient flow competes against a flow of planned hospital admissions for the same beds and the lack of a clearly defined policy on either prioritising ER patient flow over planned admissions or vice versa contributes to a disordered system. What does this paper add? We compared several simulated scenarios corresponding to different bed management policies. The scenario that gave priority to planned admissions and surgery gave the most suitable results. What are the implications for practitioners? Postponing scheduled surgical patients was not an efficient procedure to solve hospital overcrowding.

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