So many patients flooded into Yale-New Haven Hospital this week that, for the first time in institutional history, the adult emergency department filled up and staff had to send patients elsewhere.
The crunch time came Wednesday afternoon, amid the busiest week in hospital history, according to YNHH spokesman Rob Hutchison.
Between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., ambulances headed to Yale-New Haven Hospital were diverted to the Hospital of St. Raphael, he said. The diversion was only for adult, non-trauma, non-psychiatric patients arriving via ambulance, Hutchison said. Walk-ins were accepted.
Hutchison called the diversion unprecedented in recent memory. “Not in my recollection have we ever had to do this. It’s just the tremendous amount of patients that were in the hospital.”
The bottleneck wasn’t related to any common illness in particular, according to the spokesman.
“We were just very, very full inside the hospital,” across all departments.
Also this week, the hospital kicked off a major expansion project to alleviate what has become a chronic overcrowding problem.
The hospital, which has 966 beds, had a record number of patients on Wednesday for this time of the year, according to Hutchison. The census reached “well into the 900s,” he said. With a shortage of free beds in other parts of the hospital, adult ER patients could not be moved to other wings, which produced a “backlog” in the emergency department, Hutchison said.
The hospital has the busiest adult emergency department in the state, he said. It is “consistently overcrowded.”
Just this week, the hospital began implementing a plan to alleviate that problem. It started work on a major construction project to expand the adult emergency department by 18,000 square feet, growing the number of beds there from 48 to 74.
“The expansion is obviously critical to the hospital,” Hutchison said. “It will help us with our patient care.”
yeah maybe that will help them from sending people like me home to die because they wanted to watch the SUPERBOWL!!!!!!!!!!!