Maximizing occupancy and providing services to patients in need of inpatient psychiatric hospitalization has always been an operational priority for hospital leadership.\u00a0 Prior to COVID-19, I have seen a lot of dual occupancy patient rooms, which is helpful for patients who are suicidal or desire social interactions.\u00a0 I have also seen a lot of variability in terms of how patients enter the unit upon admission, and the design of that patient flow.\u00a0 Collectively, providers were not as focused on planning for a significant infectious disease pandemic, as that seemed more abstract and theoretical.\u00a0 As we all know now, that is no longer an academic exercise.<\/p>\n
Maximizing occupancy and managing the safety and security of patient flow upon admission looks different in COVID times.\u00a0 If only we would have considered a pandemic in previous designs.\u00a0 But, how would we have known the impact this would have had on us, or hospital teams, our patients, and patient families?\u00a0 We can do better going forward since we all learn from mistakes, challenges, fears, and points of frustration.<\/p>\n
From lessons learned, there are new implications for patient population-specific proportion of single vs. dual occupancy rooms.\u00a0 There are definitely implications for bringing patients straight onto a general unit and exposing infection and risk to the general population of patients and staff.\u00a0 There are implications for the location of triaging and assessing patients before admission.\u00a0 There are implications for patient belongings, and ancillary team member\u2019s entry points, functions, and locations of such support spaces.\u00a0 By controlling this patient flow better, we can leverage this thinking to also control security and safety issues related to highly aggressive patients or patients who are at risk for elopement.\u00a0 We can turn this \u201cproblem\u201d into an opportunity for minimizing other risks as well.<\/p>\n
How else can we learn from challenges to our hospitals and staff?\u00a0 We turn it into a strength going forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maximizing occupancy and providing services to patients in need of inpatient psychiatric hospitalization has always been an operational priority for hospital leadership.\u00a0 Prior to COVID-19, I have seen a lot of dual occupancy patient rooms, which is helpful for patients who are suicidal or desire social interactions.\u00a0 I have also seen a lot of variability […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3203,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-behavioral-health"],"yoast_head":"\n