Importance of Hospital Beds And Challenges Coming In Their Management

Hospital beds are not structured like a traditional bed rather they come with the ability to adjust the frame as a whole as per the desire of the laying person. The hospital beds are made while keeping in view the possible need of the patients and their comforts. Both head and foot areas of the bed are designed to manually adjust them as per the need of time. That is why they prevent bed sores for longer stays and even help recover the patient from many medical conditions. Overall, it provides patients with a supportive bed surface through all means.

Usually, hospital beds are expensive because of their high-tech designs and several exceptional functionalities. However, some models come with many different capabilities at a fair cost.  Well, bed management in hospitals is of more importance than their costs as the staff have to face many challenges even in Electronic bed management system. An improved hospital bed management can be achieved by clearly understanding the challenges that are common nowadays. Some of these areas are following:

1. Bottlenecks in patient flow

A bottleneck is the part of the patient care journey that is unable to meet the demand for services effectively.

Bottlenecks inpatient flow are among the barriers in the hospitals as they directly impact both the patient experience and hospital profitability. The phenomenon occurs when the demand for beds or a particular hospital service is more than the hospital’s available resources. In case, they are not addressed immediately, bottlenecks can considerably impact the patient care experience as a whole.

2. Poor Bed Visibility

When management has no idea and is unable to figure out how many beds are available for the coming patients, it means there is poor bed management in the hospital. So, one can say that hospitals that lack real-time visibility of available beds are relying on outdated information. As a result, underestimation can put patients on wait as open beds remain unoccupied. While on the other hand, overestimating the available beds might cause frustration as patients are sent to beds that are already occupied.

3. Defective Beds

Nothing in the world is resistant to problems, not even in hospitals. So, if a hospital bed breaks down, the loss is much costly as a patient room remains free until the bed is back in usable form after repair or replaced entirely. Issues include worn parts, lapses in preventive maintenance, and operational errors.

4. Sluggish Cash Flow

Poor patient flow, bad maintenance, and canceled surgeries come together to cause a sluggish cash flow for hospitals. And when hospitals are unable to generate revenue as per their goals, they can barely think of expanding their services and provision of more facilities. Also, it will be unable to invest in more advanced technology – as a result, it loses the ability to maintain its competitive position.

5. Canceled surgeries

If a hospital lacks resources and faces shortages of beds, the problem might become so serious that sometimes patients may have their surgeries canceled.