If we cannot move patients out of beds when they are ready to leave, we cannot take more patients in.
It’s as simple as that. And so we have bottlenecks — acute care beds filled with patients we cannot discharge even though they are ready to be discharged, which in turn, backs up patients in the emergency room, which in turn, backs up ambulances waiting to offload patients.
We are always working to improve how quickly we take over patient care from ambulances. The overcrowded emergency rooms and bottlenecks we are experiencing now will only get worse if AB 40 becomes law. At Scripps Health, we now have 33,417 avoidable beds days — a hospital bed occupied by a patient who does not need it — annually. That’s up from 11,119 three years ago. And our daily average jumped 200 percent from 30 in 2019 to 91 in 2023. The annual cost we absorb because of this has skyrocketed more than 250 percent during that same period, from $16.7 million to $59 million.
This problem is felt at hospitals across the United States. At the urging of the American Hospital Association and hospitals across the country, Congress considered proposals to compensate hospitals for some of their avoidable bed day costs through a temporary Medicare payment adjustment, but to date, those proposals have not succeeded.
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