Hospital beds is not a very valuable statistic because it’s not a fixed resource. Hospitals can remove elective procedures or transfer them to other facilities, can add surge capacity, and/or can go above surge capacity by reformatting non-ICU beds into ICU beds. Hospitals try to maximize ICU usage during the best of times from a fiscal perspective, so % utilized at any given time is not informative without a lot of context.

Don’t know about the others, but Baylor in Harris County is not really close to nominal capacity.

This post was edited on 7/1/20 at 7:53 pm

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Posted by Big Scrub TX

Member since Dec 2013

33749 posts

Posted on 7/1/20 at 9:25 pm to Athanatos

quote:
Hospital beds is not a very valuable statistic because it’s not a fixed resource. Hospitals can remove elective procedures or transfer them to other facilities, can add surge capacity, and/or can go above surge capacity by reformatting non-ICU beds into ICU beds. Hospitals try to maximize ICU usage during the best of times from a fiscal perspective, so % utilized at any given time is not informative without a lot of context.

Don’t know about the others, but Baylor in Harris County is not really close to nominal capacity.

Got it. Is there a meaningful stat that tracks what we would care about in this regard - i.e. hospitals actually getting over-burdened?

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Posted by pleading the fifth

Member since Feb 2006

3900 posts

Posted on 7/1/20 at 10:47 pm to Athanatos

quote:
Hospital beds is not a very valuable statistic because it’s not a fixed resource. Hospitals can remove elective procedures or transfer them to other facilities, can add surge capacity, and/or can go above surge capacity by reformatting non-ICU beds into ICU beds.

Accurate. At our hospital our surge capacity plan more than doubled our regular ICU capacity, suspended elective procedures, and utilized anesthesia machines as additional ventilators. We never even approached more than 1/4 of our regular ICU capacity with COVID positive patients at our peak.

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Posted by Big Scrub TX

Member since Dec 2013

33749 posts

Posted on 7/2/20 at 12:27 am to Athanatos

quote:
Hospitals can remove elective procedures

I went back and re-read what you wrote and this caught my eye. I don't find that exactly comforting. "Elective" procedures seems like it was pretty broad back in March. A friend of mine missed being able to have a hernia operation by just a few days. I never would have thought of that as "elective" but he is only now being scheduled to finally have it. It's been a brutal stretch for him.

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