Boarding Patients in Emergency Room Hallways Can Increase Risk of Medical Error
The reality in most emergency rooms around that country is that many patients wait several hours to be evaluated, treated and finally admitted to the hospital. Far too often, patients end of “boarding” in emergency room hallways as they await for a hospital bed to open. This opinion piece published on NPR, talks of a bedridden patient with chest pain who spent 47 hours in the hallway before they were finally moved into an open spot in the cardiac unit. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2016, two-thirds of American hospitals boarded patients in the ER for more than two hours while waiting for an inpatient bed, affecting about one in five patients.
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