There is no question that Americans have suffered great loss of life and endured financial hardships, across all sectors, over the past 32 months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontline healthcare workers risked their lives, provided care during physically and emotionally demanding situations, and bore witness to their patients’ goodbyes to loved ones from afar.
Yet, in recent months, hospital emergency departments (EDs) have been brought to a breaking point. Not from a novel problem – rather, from a decades-long,(1) unresolved problem known as patient “boarding,” where admitted patients are held in the ED when there are no inpatient beds available. While the causes of ED boarding are multifactorial, unprecedented and rising staffing shortages throughout the health care system have recently brought this issue to a crisis point, further spiraling the stress and burnout driving the current exodus of excellent physicians, nurses and other health care professionals.
Boarding has become its own public health emergency. Our nation’s safety net is on the verge of breaking beyond repair; EDs are gridlocked and overwhelmed with patients waiting – waiting to be seen; waiting for admission to an inpatient bed in the hospital; waiting to be transferred to psychiatric, skilled nursing, or other specialized facilities; or, waiting simply to return to their nursing home. And this breaking point is entirely outside the control of the highly skilled emergency physicians, nurses, and other ED staff doing their best to keep everyone attended to and alive.
Any emergency patient can find themselves boarded, regardless of their condition, age, insurance coverage, income, or geographic area. Patients in need of intensive care may board for hours in ED beds not set up for the extra monitoring they need. Those in mental health crises, often children or adolescents, board for months in chaotic EDs while waiting for a psychiatric inpatient bed to open anywhere. Boarding doesn’t just impact those waiting to receive care elsewhere. When ED beds are already filled with boarded patients, other patients are decompensating and, in some cases, dying while in ED waiting rooms during their tenth, eleventh, or even twelfth hour of waiting to be seen by a physician. The story recently reported(2) about a nurse in Washington who called 911 as her ED became completely overwhelmed with waiting patients and boarders is not unique – it is happening right now in EDs across the country, every day.
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