Sheila Ducharme
Bed Control Specialist, 5/21/2020
Bed management is responsible for bringing all admitted patients into the University and Memorial campuses.
At this time we do not cover the Clinton, Marlboro or Leominster campuses but we do attempt, on occasion, to transfer to these hospitals when we have to help ease the numbers in our ER’s. Our admissions come from the ERs, clinics, home, doctors’ offices, Hahnemann Campus and other hospitals that contact our nurses here in the Transfer Center, hoping to have a patient accepted to either of our hospitals. We are a twenty-four hour operation with rotating assignments. Among other things, one person books the University Campus, one books the Memorial Campus and the third keeps track of when patients are transferred to another campus, where they went to and to which service and Doctor the patient is now under as well as putting all direct admits into the system. The phones never stop.
We’ve had some changes occur with the COVID direct admits. Most clinics and Dr offices have been working from home. Since the onset of the coronavirus we’ve received our requests for admissions in a couple different ways. We’ve always received faxes but lately have received many via e-mail, too. Every patient has had to be screened before they arrived at the hospital. The Dr and Nurses of all these areas have been very accommodating in helping to get this information to us. It’s been difficult to tell these people when we call them with a room that they cannot have any visitors.
We’ve had many floors and units added to our regular volume of beds. All of these were made COVID-ready rooms, both med surg and ICU levels of care. We found it impressive how quickly the hospital was able to meet our needs for negative-pressure beds. The addition of the DCU center was also amazing. It was added to our work flow as new hospital to book to just like we do the University and Memorial Campuses now. It certainly helped to ease the demand here at the Medical Center and supplied rooms for the homeless of the city as well. It’s unfortunate, however, just how quickly we were able to fill them but are happy to see some of those units are closing at this time.
One of the hardest parts of the COVID experience was having to present five or six different counts daily to 5 or 6 different places. Each requirement was asking in different way the same information, but each had to be calculated and reported differently. A lot of these reports went to the State level and to our command center administration here at the hospital. Reported daily were things such as COVID med-surg beds booked, COVID ICU beds booked, available open COVID beds, confirmed COVID transfers, etc. There are quite a few categories we need to report out.
Through all of this, it was work as usual with a different kind of patient clientele. The COVID numbers were very high but the surgery schedules were very low. It became just a new type of patient to book for a different reason. We attempted to do so as quickly as possible to keep the flow going and keep things moving in the ER. We choose which patients go into each bed. It all depends on waiting time for a room, the service they are being admitted to and level of care they need. Our Transfer Center nurses work with the EICU to determine the ICU level of care placement and let us know which unit they will go to.
We expect the need for COVID beds to continue. It will be a balancing act to have regular rooms and covid rooms available for the ERs and direct admits as our numbers for regular patients increase, once again. Added to this will be the OR schedules. Both campuses have very active OR schedules that were all but put on hold during the last couple of months. We expect things to become extremely busy in the immediate future and foresee it to be a balancing act. Certainly, very challenging to say the least but we are never bored!
