Diversion
Many people have heard the term “on diversion” related to the hospital and not accepting patients. What does this actually mean?
Diversion is a term used when a hospital has no available beds. It does not specify why the diversion has occurred. At Floyd, every diversion last year was due to one of two reasons. Either all beds were occupied or there were no available monitored beds. Monitored beds are those in which a heart monitors or other monitoring equipment can be placed on a patient and observed from the central monitoring station. These are limited in every hospital.
Other hospitals occasionally go “on-diversion” when they don’t have adequate nursing staff to care for patients. This has not occurred at Floyd in the past year.
When a hospital is “on-diversion”, ambulances are informed and they then divert patients to the next closest available hospital that can meet the needs of the patient. Physicians are informed and they are instructed not to electively admit patients or are told they have to send them elsewhere.
If patients arrive to the emergency room when the hospital is “on-diversion” and the patient later needs to be admitted, the emergency room will hold the patient until a room becomes available. This puts a burden on the emergency room and its staff as they lose access to that emergency room bed. In addition, the nurses have to tend to routine in-patient care not normally provided by emergency room personnel.
This is a daily occurrence at University Hospital and occurred dozens of times at Floyd and Clark in the past years. Diversion does have seasonal variations with winter flu being the most common.
Increasing the number of monitored beds with the newest addition at Floyd should theoretically help with this problem. Unfortunately, the total number of beds is changing very little and we will therefore likely be “on-diversion” when all the beds are occupied during peak seasons.
Diversion is a term used when a hospital has no available beds. It does not specify why the diversion has occurred. At Floyd, every diversion last year was due to one of two reasons. Either all beds were occupied or there were no available monitored beds. Monitored beds are those in which a heart monitors or other monitoring equipment can be placed on a patient and observed from the central monitoring station. These are limited in every hospital.
Other hospitals occasionally go “on-diversion” when they don’t have adequate nursing staff to care for patients. This has not occurred at Floyd in the past year.
When a hospital is “on-diversion”, ambulances are informed and they then divert patients to the next closest available hospital that can meet the needs of the patient. Physicians are informed and they are instructed not to electively admit patients or are told they have to send them elsewhere.
If patients arrive to the emergency room when the hospital is “on-diversion” and the patient later needs to be admitted, the emergency room will hold the patient until a room becomes available. This puts a burden on the emergency room and its staff as they lose access to that emergency room bed. In addition, the nurses have to tend to routine in-patient care not normally provided by emergency room personnel.
This is a daily occurrence at University Hospital and occurred dozens of times at Floyd and Clark in the past years. Diversion does have seasonal variations with winter flu being the most common.
Increasing the number of monitored beds with the newest addition at Floyd should theoretically help with this problem. Unfortunately, the total number of beds is changing very little and we will therefore likely be “on-diversion” when all the beds are occupied during peak seasons.
posted by Anonymous at 6:10 AM
3 Comments:
Why is the total number of bed not going to increase with the new addition?
Curious...
Roz Tate
Inquirer
Because all rooms will become private rooms, eliminating semi-privates.
The answer is a little more complex but anonymous is correct. Transitioning to all private rooms gives the hospital the flexibility to utilize rooms more efficiently. Now, with the increase in certain types of infections, semi-private rooms cannot be used if one of the patients has an infection. Therefore you lose a potential bed.
We are increasing the monitored beds and that should help a lot with the way the census runs.
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