Inpatient bedspacing: could a common response to hospital crowding cause increased patient mortality?

Emergency department (ED) overcrowding results in patient and provider dissatisfaction, poorer quality of care, increased healthcare costs, and even increased mortality in some studies.1–4 In response to this evidence, many hospitals have instituted full capacity protocols in which patients in the ED who are admitted but waiting for a bed on the home ward of the admitting service are sent to the first available inpatient bed (or even inpatient hallway) even if it is off-service—a practice known in the UK as boarding or medical outliers,5 6 and in other countries as bedspacing.

Why might bedspacing matter? Caring for these patients may seem to present only the minor inconvenience to physicians of making short trips off their home ward to visit the floor of some other clinical service. The potential problem arises with undermining multidisciplinary care. While physician...

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