Director creates script for use in bed control
Aim is to avoid 'negative connotation'
At California Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles "we never want [staff] to say, 'We do not have any beds,'" says Elizabeth Oliver, director for access care for the facility, which is part of Catholic Healthcare West (CHW).
While there are occasions when a bed is not immediately available, Oliver adds, the intent is to avoid any "negative connotation" or suggestion to the physician "that we don't want to take your patient."
"We wanted to say it in a different manner something about [having] an opportunity to help them later with a little scripting," she says. "I have scripts for patient assistance and collections and wanted to model those, to come up with something in the same format."
Oliver's plan was to give the bed management scripts to the hospital's preadmission/bed control nurse and to registration staff, who get calls for direct admits through the emergency department.
A little research and several phone calls to colleagues at other facilities found no evidence of scripts being used by bed management staff, Oliver adds, so she decided to write her own, which she is still in the process of tweaking.
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"It was interesting to find that no one I called [at other facilities] does any scripting [for bed management]," she notes. "Some had ideas and word-of-mouth [suggestions], but nothing put together and written down."
Several of the people she spoke to at other hospitals asked her to pass along any scripting that she might create, Oliver says.
Her scripts address three different scenarios: In addition to the one used when no beds are available, there is a script giving language to use when a bed is available and another for the proper handling of an initial request for a bed.
The bed request script, she notes, asks for specific information from the caller, including patient demographics, insurance data, and other required documents.
Criteria sought for each unit
One of the other things her department is doing to streamline bed management, Oliver notes, is asking each nursing unit to provide its own criteria for admission. That allows the admitting nurse to look at, for example, the specific guidelines for admission of a medical-surgical patient in addition to InterQual criteria.
There are challenges, she adds, in regard to making sure that proper guidelines are followed in the admission of patients coming from outside the hospital and from the ED.
These guidelines would come into play, Oliver says, "if a physician in the area decides to admit a patient and wants to admit the person to the intensive care unit when he would be fine in med-surg."
(Editor's note: Elizabeth Oliver can be reached at [email protected]. Look for more information on the bed management process at California Hospital Medical Center in the next issue of Hospital Access Management.)
At California Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles "we never want [staff] to say, 'We do not have any beds,'" says Elizabeth Oliver, director for access care for the facility, which is part of Catholic Healthcare West (CHW).You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
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