AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Too many patients, not enough beds.
Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that the national hospital occupancy rate has gone up since the start of the coronavirus pandemic five years ago. And health experts are sounding the alarm about hospital bed shortages.
ARJUN VENKATESH: When occupancy goes above 85%, the whole system starts working a little bit slower.
It gets harder to make sure that a patient can get an MRI. It gets harder to make sure that a patient can get their surgery in time.
And the hospital starts to become more and more dysfunctional. Nationally, we’re going to be above that 85% number in a few years if we don’t do something to correct this.
RASCOE: Dr. Arjun Venkatesh chairs the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. He described what’s happening.
VENKATESH: What we are seeing is increasingly crowded hospitals and hospitals that are over capacity, more patients waiting to be seen, struggling to get the timely care they need.
RASCOE: Is it that we don’t have enough hospitals or we just don’t have enough beds for, like, population growth?
VENKATESH: It’s all of those things at the same time. We have fewer hospitals, particularly hospitals that are in more rural areas or hospitals that may have fewer beds or smaller size, can’t keep the budgets to stay open and so they have closed.
And across health care – and this is what’s happened new since the coronavirus pandemic – we’re having a nationwide staffing crisis. And so what that’s resulted in is alongside a country that’s getting older and sicker with more and more needs for hospital care, less and less supply of both beds and the people that take care of you in those beds to match it …
