What ’s going to replace hospitals that downsize?

I recently rounded on patients at Providence Hospital as the attending physician on the family medicine residency program’s inpatient service. Providence recently closed its maternity ward as the first step in a planned redevelopment of the hospital grounds into a “health village.” In the short term, the hospital’s decision to stop delivering babies may worsen maternal health disparities, as the entire eastern side of Washington, DC is now a “maternity care desert” with no labor and delivery services. In Providence’s defense, it lost $23 million in fiscal year 2016, and its long-term plan to replace hospital beds with ambulatory services and spaces that support community health and wellness is part of a broader national trend. As Dr. Neel Shah wrote recently in Politico’s “The Case Against Hospital Beds”: Some corners of the health care world are already starting to embrace new, less bed-focused models of care. … [At a] venture-capital based birthing center franchise, birthing families are often admitted and discharged on the same day, and beds are in the corner of the room (for resting and breastfeeding after the baby is born), rather than in the center; the idea is to encourage the mom to use movement as much as possible to support her labor by literally sidelining the bed. Health systems are increasingly investing in other types of spaces where bedrest is not the default, including skilled nursing and...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Policy Hospital-Based Medicine Public Health & Source Type: blogs