NO VACANCYImagine that you booked a hotel room for $150/night and when you arrived at your room you found out that you would be sharing it with a complete stranger. You would each have your own bed of course, and the room even comes with a nice thin yellow curtain that can be used to partition the room in half. Both of you would share the same bathroom with the bonus option of requesting a portable commode so that you could conduct your business right at the bedside. Unfortunately, that nice yellow curtain isn't thick enough to block out smells or noises.
Am I the only person who would find such a situation unacceptable? And yet, these are the exact same conditions we subject our patients to when they are admitted to the hospital.
A shared double room is the norm and patients requesting a single room are frequently charged extra. Sometimes patients get lucky and land a single room without having to pay extra but this is usually only happens when the double rooms are all booked.
What's the problem with sharing a hospital room? How about the increased risk of hospital acquired infections? Frequently, patients with communicable diseases aren't identified when they first hit the door. Only later is it discovered that the patient has C. Diff (diarrhea), MRSA (skin infections), or some other super-bug that is resistant to many antibiotics. Being in the same room, sharing a common bathroom, having hospital personnel move back and forth between you and your roommate increases the risk that these infections continue to pass throughout the hospital. This is why once patients are identified with certain infections they are moved into single rooms. However, these isolation measures are frequently only implemented once the patient has interacted with multiple hospital staff and his/her roommate. If we really cared about stomping out hospital acquired infections, we would start by requiring all patients to be in single rooms. Unfortunately, these changes probably won't occur until a patient is afflicted with a hospital acquired infection and sues the hospital because he was placed in a room with someone that was also infected.
The counter argument hospitals will make is that there just aren't enough beds to make such a change feasible. Interesting when you consider that there is enough money to continually build more research buildings and operating rooms. We have enough money to spend billions on research infrastructure but don't have the millions required to insure that the patients don't get harmed by the very hospitals to which they go for help. Of course, building more research buildings, opening more operating suites, and buying more MRI machines increases the revenue of a hospital. Ensuring each patient gets his/her own room only hurts the bottom line.
The counter argument hospitals will make is that there just aren't enough beds to make such a change feasible. Interesting when you consider that there is enough money to continually build more research buildings and operating rooms. We have enough money to spend billions on research infrastructure but don't have the millions required to insure that the patients don't get harmed by the very hospitals to which they go for help. Of course, building more research buildings, opening more operating suites, and buying more MRI machines increases the revenue of a hospital. Ensuring each patient gets his/her own room only hurts the bottom line.
