ICU room and cost to maintain

[AllenW]

Tried google, but no luck, anybody know the cost for the hospital to equip and maintain a ICU room?
Not the patient cost, just the hospital.


During a conversation it was mentioned the hospitals ought to have more ICU rooms, I thought the cost to have one of them rooms empty was pretty high, don't know how high though.

tia

al

[Custom Eyes]

Here's a Princeton study of the direct (patient care) and indirect (general overhead, housekeeping, etc) costs for a hospital ICU.

https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk3...417/841705.PDF

[bigdaddyguns]

High fixed cost OPX/CAPX resource that is typically designed for 70-80% utilization rate. Too costly to support unused capacity for non-normative oversubscription events.

[cruiseforever1]

There are many open ICU beds. The problem is staffing them.

[Mojo-NC]

What I would like to see is an emergency room that has a working agreement with a nearby 24-hour urgent care or primary care facility where they could send all non-emergency patients to in order to keep an emergency room for just that - emergency cases.

The last time I went to an emergency room was when my wife had and extreme case of food poisoning. She was becoming extremely dehydrated to the point where she needed IV ondansetron to stop her vomiting and fluids to keep her hydrated. The first ER was full of non-emergency indigent patients who were using the ER as their primary care office. It was disgusting - unsupervised little kids were running around eating candy off of the floor, etc., total chaos. We left and went to another ER where she actually received the proper care. After receiving proper medication and medical care, we were back home in about 5 hours.

What we have now in many hospitals just ain't working. We don't need more ERs, we need those we have to be actual ERs.