Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water! I agree that the root cause of inpatient medicine’s problem is that hospital systems are understaffed. We need to invest more in staffing, including nursing and most importantly social workers. The social workers on the 18th floor at Virginia Mason in Seattle were amazing when I worked as an medical intern. We need to invest more in education. More nursing schools and more medical schools need to be built. Also, we need to encourage more people to go into medical profession. We need to highlight how truly special and privileged it is to be in the medical field. We need more people going into primary care for prevention and becoming internist to coordinate the care of our sickest patients. But technology can be used as a stopgap as we try to recover our crumbling healthcare infrastructure. Technology can also be instrumental in ushering our healthcare system into the relatively new millennium.
Vice Chair & Professor of Medicine, UNC | Balanced healthcare perspectives
Inpatient care is in a state of emergency. I recently caught up with a doctor friend of mine who runs a hospitalist program at a large West Coast AMC. He’s even-keeled and certainly not one to catastrophize. But when discussing inpatient care, he pulled no punches, explaining, “It’s absolute chaos. At least during COVID, we had a mission.” Why? The work is harder than ever. Patients are sicker and have more complex needs than ever before. Yet there aren’t enough healthcare workers – especially bedside nurses and care coordinators – to care for them. And unless patients can be discharged home, there’s often nowhere to send them. Under-staffed skilled nursing facilities are also full. Consequently, care is happening in slow motion. Patients without close advocates (family/friends) literally get lost in the shuffle. Even those with advocates can spend days in the emergency department awaiting a bed. Unfortunately, this is becoming the national norm. We can't ignore it. When I asked my hospitalist friend how he’d try to fix these problems, he said he’d invest all available capital in staffing. And zero dollars into more tech. #healthcareworkers #healthcareheroes #healthcareonlinkedin