Bruce Crowther is president and CEO of Northwest Community Hospital, and has more than 30 years of experience in healthcare leadership. His new column, posted the first Wednesday of every month, provides insight into how healthcare and hospitals work.
It’s hard to miss all of the hospital expansion going on in Chicago’s suburbs, and the addition of private patient rooms.
Northwest Community Hospital opened its own nine-story South Pavilion in May. Our new addition has 200 private rooms – a feature that’s not exclusive to NCH. In fact, visitors who walk down the halls of the area’s new hospital projects will find private rooms the new norm.
Are we all getting into the luxury hotel business? Hardly.
To understand how we got here and why private rooms are critical to better patient care, it helps to know a little about how hospitals have evolved.
The first hospitals were large tents used in wartime to care for the injured, usually 32 patients at a time on small cots. As hospitals moved from the battlefield to actual buildings, the tents became 32-bed wards. Over time, wards became smaller, moving from 32 to 16 to eight, and then to four beds. In the late 1950s and early 1960s when NCH was built, the semi-private room with two beds was the norm.
That brings us to today, where a growing body of research makes a compelling case for the private room environment, especially when the goal is to create a total healing environment where everything is geared toward making people feel better faster.
In a nutshell, hospitals have learned that private rooms offer improved safety and infection control, increased satisfaction, and operational efficiencies. Let’s take a closer look.
Safety issues like patient falls and medical errors can lengthen a hospital stay, which contradicts our goal of making people feel better faster. Because private rooms have more space, family members are likely to spend more time with the patient and are present to assist when they’re getting out of bed, when many falls occur. Single rooms also decrease the number of patient transports, which promotes continuity of care and reduces the risk of medical errors like a medication mistake.
Infections can also lengthen a hospital stay. Data shows that private rooms lower the instance of airborne infections by eliminating proximity to infected patients.
Private rooms have been shown to increase satisfaction levels for patients, their families and hospital staff alike. The privacy alone provides a better healing environment, where patients get more rest and recover more quickly. The larger space allows for family members to spend the night comfortably and aid the recovery process. And research indicates that single rooms help simplify the jobs of nurses, physicians and other healthcare employees, again increasing satisfaction levels and quality of care.
Last but not least, private rooms provide operational efficiencies. Improvements in infection rates, patient falls, patient transport rates, medical errors, and satisfaction all contribute to operational savings. It’s also important to note that a 200-bed hospital of private rooms can fill 200 beds. A 200-bed hospital of shared rooms cannot. That’s because a shared-room hospital can only fill about two-thirds of its rooms with two patients due to the incompatibilities between patients, ultimately resulting in less capacity.
Clearly more than a luxury, the private hospital room makes good sense in today’s healthcare environment.
