[NRSKarenRN]

Found at healthleadersmedia.com

Plan could close 20 or more New York hospitals
A long-awaited plan to shrink New York State’s hospital industry landed with force, with proposals that could effectively eliminate 20 or more hospitals and thousands of jobs, and make dozens of other hospitals shrink, merge or take on new roles.
New York Times, Nov. 29, 2006


See: Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century
Executive Summary
Full report

[Angie O'Plasty, RN]

I'm shocked. To cut healthcare costs, hospitals are being closed and vital services will not be available.

Some solution!

[Dixielee]

Most hospitals I have worked in as a travel nurse have a severe shortage of beds already, with long hold times in the ER to get a bed. With further closures of beds, what in the world is this going to do to their ER's??

[NRSKarenRN]

Excess Capacity Weakens Our System

A fundamental driver of the crisis in our health care delivery system is excess capacity. New York State is over-bedded and many hospital beds lie empty on any given day. The statewide hospital occupancy rate has fallen from 82.8% of certified beds in 1983 to 65.3% in 2004, a decrease of 17.5%. On a staffed bed basis, approximately one quarter of hospital beds are currently unoccupied. Occupancy rates vary by region and are especially low in Western, Northern, and Central regions. Some individual hospitals are more than half empty. Certain pockets of the state have too many nursing home beds while others have too few. The statewide average nursing home occupancy rate has been in decline since 1994 despite a gradually aging population.

[oramar]

Let me guess how this goes down. Hospitals will be shut down in areas were incomes and health insurance are low and new wings will be added on to hospitals in wealthy areas. Sorry about my bad attitute.

[NRSKarenRN]

Oramar, supprisingly this report shows the opposite....

The commission used six criteria to grade each hospital and nursing home: the amount of service it provides to poor, minority and elderly patients; the availability of alternatives in its area; the quality of care; how heavily it is used; how well it is doing financially; and the local economic impact of closing or shrinking it.

The hospitals it recommended for closing or conversion to other uses are mostly small, underused, losing money, and near other hospitals that could take their patients, but there are some exceptions. Most are in middle-income districts, not in poorer neighborhoods as some had feared. As expected the academic medical centers that are closely tied to medical schools would not close, and only one, in Syracuse, would shrink significantly.