Quality of care of hospitalized internal medicine patients bedspaced to non-internal medicine inpatient units.

ABSTRACT:

Background

When the number of patients requiring hospital admission exceeds the number of available department-allotted beds, patients are often placed on a different specialty's inpatient ward, a practice known as "bedspacing". Whether bedspacing affects quality of patient care has not been previously studied.

Methods

We reviewed consecutive general internal medicine (GIM) admissions for congestive heart failure (CHF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and pneumonia at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, Canada, from 2007 to 2011 and examined whether quality of care differs between bedspaced and nonbedspaced patients. We matched each bedspaced patient with a GIM ward patient admitted on the same call shift with the same diagnosis. The primary outcome was the rati

SUBMITTER: Liu J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4153721 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature