Emergency Department Boarding Stories

In our large hospital it is common that patients who need to be admitted to the hospital have to wait in the Emergency Department hallways until a hospital bed opens up...sometimes for days. When a mother of four and grandmother of eight was brought to the hospital by her family for weakness on Friday afternoon she was diagnosed with pneumonia and needed to be admitted to the hospital for IV antibiotics.

If she had been in a hospital room over the weekend, she likely would have been ready to go home by Monday...

While boarding in the ER hallway for the whole weekend the ER nurses dutifully gave her antibiotics, but her Parkinson Disease medications were not continued (her family didn't bring them from home and forgot to mention it to staff). If she had been in a hospital room over the weekend, she likely would have been ready to go home by Monday, but because she'd missed her home medications she was in a full blown Parkinson crisis, struggling from difficult to treat delirium. As a result, she had a week long hospital stay that was followed by a prolonged nursing home stay.