BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio) — In a press release on Friday, Massachusetts General Hospital announced that they are struggling to accommodate for unprecedented overcrowding.
The President of MGH David F.M. Brown, MD, pointed to the pandemic as exacerbating the factors leading to MGH’s current capacity issue. “While hospital overcrowding has significantly affected patient care for many years, COVID-19 and the post-pandemic demand for care has escalated this challenge into a full-blown crisis – for patients seeking necessary emergency care, as well as for staff who are required to work under these increasingly stressful conditions,” he said.
The problem is affecting the Emergency Department particularly hard, MGH said. Specifically, on a nearly daily basis for almost a year and a half, the Emergency Department has been given the most critical statuses of either “Code Help” or “Capacity Disaster” in terms of overcrowding. This means that more often than not, all inpatient beds and monitored hallway stretchers in the Emergency Department have been full, the press release said.
On Jan. 11, the Emergency Department faced one of their most crowded days that the hospital has experienced “in its two centuries caring for Boston and its surrounding communities,” MGH said.
“This crisis is most acutely felt in our [Emergency Department], where patients wait hours for an inpatient bed. Put simply, every day between 50 and 80 patients spend the first night of their hospitalization in the ED, which is not an appropriate or therapeutic environment for anyone and contributes significantly to clinician burnout and frustration,” said Brown.
MGH operates as a community hospital for a variety of places including Chelsea, Charlestown, Everett, Revere and large parts of Boston, which has contributed to the hospital being “uniquely challenged” when it comes to capacity problems.
In the same press release, MGH outlined the steps that they are taking to alleviate these problems. This includes increasing the number of inpatient beds after certain construction projects have been completed.
Brown explained how more beds will help this crisis. “Adding more beds to MGH will greatly help alleviate this capacity crisis, enhance access for patients and substantially improve the overall working conditions for our clinicians and staff.”
Another measure that the MGH announced was a collaboration with the Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA). MGH urgent and primary care centers currently offer to send patients who need emergency care to CHA Everett to help with overcrowding in the Emergency Department at MGH.
Brown added that MGH takes their job to provide vital health care to people very seriously. “We will always provide care to every person who crosses our threshold – a responsibility we take extremely seriously,” said Brown.
Patients can learn more about how MGH plans to address the overcrowding crisis at their new website.
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