1600 mile transfer for bed

This is indeed scary and just what many of us fear. What happens when a loved one is in a car wreck or has a cardiac event requiring ICU/hospitalization? Where will that put them?

We have had a purple heart veteran die of gallstone pancreatitis waiting for a bed already. How many more will die waiting for care?

34 minutes ago, SmilingBluEyes said:

How many more will die waiting for care?

The story of the veteran is so sad. And how many nurses will be faced with patients deteriorating on the floors with nowhere to send them? It's going to be stressful for the nurses and unsafe for patients as resources just aren't there. 

3 hours ago, JBMmom said:

(Granted they couldn't have had the capability to contact every hospital in the country but it sounds like they reached out to MANY health systems and within our hospital system we were the only one with an open bed) I realize that is not to say that we were the only open ICU bed in the country

My assumption is that your facility was the only facility with an open ICU bed within your hospital system. They want to keep the money within the system instead of giving away the money to a competitor.

When we talked about a lack of beds we are really talking about a lack of staff. When the media says all the beds in the state are filled, that means all the beds that actually have staff to take care of the patient are filled. Of course there is less staff now because people are fleeing the profession.

5 minutes ago, Emergent said:

When we talked about a lack of beds we are really talking about a lack of staff. When the media says all the beds in the state are filled, that means all the beds that actually have staff to take care of the patient are filled. Of course there is less staff now because people are fleeing the profession.

Sometimes it's both - my hospital is both struggling with staffing, and every bed (with the exception of a few on our covid/isolation unit) is full (but we can't use those for non-covid patients due to infection risk).    We're under pressure to take even more patients and to admit them faster - my question is where are we to put them? We're working on opening more units (on property owned by hospital, but units are needing to be physically built out and staff hired), so it'll still be another couple of months before those are up and running. 

It gets to a point though were staffed beds vs physical beds is semantics - if you don't have people to care for patients - the physical beds don't do much on their own thus you can't actually provide care to any more patients realistically. 

I  work in a semi rural hospital in CA as an EM Physician. Transfers of greater than 100 miles are common, happening about once every three of my shifts. In normal times, hospitals are operating at near capacity. With the pandemic, hospitals are full. EMTALA which is the law regarding transfers is a federal statute. Transfers across state lines are becoming common. The OP implies that their system is accepting patients based on a financial metric; I am happy when any system accepts patients for care my hospital cannot provide.