Bed Flow Management in Emergency Departments

Assignment 2
Bed Flow
Student Name:
Unit Name: Managing Modern Healthcare Organisations
Date:

Bed Flow 2
Executive Summary
The topic of the study is Bed Flow Management in Emergency Departments. The topic is
associated with the problem of congestion and overcrowding of beds that degrades the quality of
care and effective health outcomes.
The purpose of the paper is to analyze the management of bed flow, identify the reasons for
bottlenecks and recommend the necessary procedures and systems for improvements.
The research was done by reviewing the related literature and identifying the existing measures
implemented to curb the problem in PoS (Port of Spain General) Hospital while comparing it to
the ideal situation with efficient systems. The study analyzed all the factors associated with the
problem of bed management such as leadership, informatics, social concerns and operations.
The main findings of the study are reducing the bed flow requires adoption of information
systems, effective leadership and address of social, cultural and political issues. It requires
efficient health policies, universal coverage of medical care facilities to mitigate the barriers and
automation of processes.
The recommendations of the report emphasize on improving the contemporary leadership
practices, automating the operations and implementing the policies to address the barriers and
discriminations which prevent certain groups of people from accessing quality healthcare
services.

Bed Flow 3
Table of Contents
Executive Summary.........................................................................................................................3
1.0 Introduction................................................................................................................................4
2.0 Analysis.....................................................................................................................................5
2.1 Background............................................................................................................................5
2.2 Purpose of the study...............................................................................................................5
2.3 Informatics.............................................................................................................................5
2.4 Clinical Leadership and administrative leadership................................................................6
2.5 Social Concerns......................................................................................................................6
2.5 Operations..............................................................................................................................6
3.0 Recommendations.....................................................................................................................6
4.0 Conclusions................................................................................................................................6
5.0 Reflection..................................................................................................................................7
6.0 References..................................................................................................................................7
7.0 Bibliography..............................................................................................................................7

Bed Flow 4
1.0 Introduction
Bed Flow Management is the process of allotting and providing beds to the patients in the
hospitals (Lovett, 2016). The term ‘bed’ represents not just a space provided to the patient to
sleep but also involves the care services such as hospital admissions, physicians’ time, diagnosis,
care, treatment and discharge. The patients from Emergency Department (ED), the urgent
referrals from GPs and elective patients require admissions to acute beds and are provided bed
placements. During the acute phase, the patients stay in the hospital and occupy the beds until
their treatment is over. When they are medically fit, they are discharged from the acute beds.
Poor management of bed flow often results from inefficient scheduling and overcrowding in
emergency departments. It may lead high patient mortality rates and increased readmissions.
High influx of patients in EDs makes them backed up, when non critical patients occupy the ED
as primary care source. Therefore, it is important to optimize the patient flow to deliver safe,
efficient and reliable care in Emergency wards.
Triage is a reliable way of identifying the patients having life threatening serious health
condition in Accident and Emergency Department (Jarvis, 2016). Triage System assesses the
patients in a 5 level scale, measuring the physiological aspects like BP, RR, Pulse, Temperature,
Oxygen Saturation and reaction level. Every level has certain time period during which the
physician should initiate the assessment. It ensures that there is no delay in treatment of
medically urgent conditions. Many types of Triage scales are used in Emergency departments
like Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS), Australasian Triage Scale (ATS), Emergency
Severity Index (ESI) and Rapid Emergency Triage and Treatment System (RETTS) (Jarvis,
2016).
Efficient Bed Flow Management increases patient safety, improves the work organisation at
emergency department and reduces the number of patients who return back from emergency
department without seeing a doctor due to long waiting lines (Lampi et al., 2018). It also reduces
the tendency of admitting the patients without a bed and offering them space in midways and
halls until the beds are available (Massachusetts Medical Society, 2018). It reduces the delayed
discharge and ambulance diversions to other hospitals.