I think this belongs in GQ. If not, mods, please move it appropriately.
Based on the large amount of British TV I have watched, all hospitals seems to consist mostly of multi-bed wards. In the US, at least in some areas, all hospitals have either single or double rooms and have for a long time. I can remember being in the hospital for my appendix operation 50 or so years ago, and it was a double room at the time. Just recently, I was hospitalized following surgery and was in a single room.
This, of course, could be why healthcare costs are so high here, but it is true that the ward is the most common accommodation in Britain? What about other countries in Europe? Rooms or Wards.
From personal experience most hospitals in England are made up of wards with a small percentage single or double rooms. I’ve stayed in both but mostly on wards. Some (children’s) hospitals only have single rooms but often are funded by charities and not solely by the NHS. I’d expect this would definitely save money over hospitals with only private rooms; it’s easier for nurses to see if a number of people are all okay at the same time, less (e.g. wall) to keep clean, fewer doors to fix. Generally a smaller hospital (with the same number of patients) would surely require less maintenance and be easier to run with a limited number of staff.
I’ve been in a Spanish hospital (out patient only) and that was in a ward in the ER, I’ve also been in the ER and a couple hospitals in China. The ER had a ward, the first hospital they wanted to put me in had wards, but I eventually stayed in the building for senior Communist Party Members which had rooms with only two beds (and tv, fridge freezer, private bathroom, room service, attractive nurses etc etc). I shared with a senior Member who was recovering from an operation, when he awoke much hilarity ensued.
It depends on the age of the hospital, but certainly there will usually be wards and some single rooms. The wards in newer hospitals are bays of half a dozen beds around a central corridor command centre, rather than a long thin room with beds down both walls. Higher dependency wards, like Intensive Care, have fewer beds and more staff.
it’s one of things which makes a hospital stay so unpleasant, in my opinion. You can be relatively private, but still, sleeping in a room with a bunch of strangers isn’t my idea of fun, not since my wild youth anyway.
Not sure how universal this is, but in my experience you get a room based on clinical need, or you can pay if there are any free. For the birth of one of my children I got the room because I was ill. For the other, I opted to pay £100 a night for it.
In Israel, a typical stay in the hospital means you are in a room with six beds. The few single rooms are reserved for serious cases, isolation, etc. The more modern hospitals have more single rooms, the older ones have mostly 6-bed rooms.
Yes, it’s a bit crowded and unpleasant.
But ,hey, it is 100%, totally free.*
(*Well, almost free…When my mother was hospitalized for 3 weeks, and it cost the family over $250—to pay for parking the car every time we visited…)
Depends on the age of the facility and whether in Australia it’s a public or Private hospital.
Generally in Victoria at least a “Ward” is an area under the control of one Nurse Unit Manager where people of a particular type of condition are placed together. Medial, Surgical, maternity etc.
I’ve never seen a totally open ward, usually they’re composed of a number of rooms with usually 4-6 beds to a room (public) with screen dividers and the occasional room of 1 or 2 beds for private patients or patients with high acuity.
In a public hospital if you have to be admitted, you get what you’re given but it costs nothing as it’s all covered by medicare.
People generally go to private hospitals for elective treatment to jump the waiting list in the public system and that’s when it costs and you need private health insurance. My son had a benign tumour in the muscle near his knee when he was 12 so I went private to get it taken out ASAP. Similar when I had his and my daughters wisdom teeth surgically removed after spending $5000 on braces for them. Both done private and in the day procedure area it was the closest I’ve seen to an open ward.
It’s much less common than it used to be and it depends on both the hospital and the speciality. Geriatrics still has a lot of multi-occupancy areas, and so do others that are intended to be short-stay, like maternity. There will always be some single and double rooms as well.
There are some advantages; it’s much quicker for the nurses to do quick checks on the patients and immediately see if someone needs help “out of turn.” And it’s far easier to attract the staff’s attention. You’d feel ridiculous pressing the call button for something as minor as asking someone to turn off the in-bed radio or pass you your glasses, but asking a passing nurse or HCA (care assistant) is fine.
It can also simply be less boring. As a kid I much preferred multi-occupancy because I could chat to the others from my bed and at least see things going on. The one time I had my own room I ended up with radio 1 driving me insane while I stared myopically at a blank wall.
Please note that the word “ward” is used for any area that has in-patients, even if they’re all in single rooms. Don’t know if that’s the same in the US.
As others indicate, all countries in which I have had the pleasure of seeing a hospital on the inside have both the large wards and private rooms. So that applies to the Netherlands, the UK and Brazil (though in Brazil I think it is 100% dependent on the kind of hospital, some I think are all shared wards).
But actually, from US tv I get the same impression, is that not the case then?
When Cook County (Illinois) Hospital was being replaced by Stroger Hospital, one of the reasons given for the necessity of re-building was that U.S. hospitals could no longer be accredited if they were nursing patients in open wards.
Stroger opened over ten years ago, and Cook County had gotten many extensions of their exemption from that standard before approval of the construction project.
The main problem was given as infection control, with privacy concerns a distant second. The British practice of housing patients in mixed-gender open wards would have had the JCAHO swooning.
The few Canadian hospitals I’ve been in, they were mainly 4-bed rooms; so not quite wards, but not really private. They had curtains to draw around any bed when the patient or doctor needed the privacy.
Based on the crowding, it’s mor spacious than the cliche “ward”, but a lot more efficient use of space than the private room. Of course, that’s because each room had a washroom, so 1 per 4 beds is more efficient spacewise than 1 per bed.
The closest thing to a ward I have seen was an emergency room before reconstruction. They had a mix of multibed areas and private rooms. On reconstruction, all the multibed areas were changed to individual treatment rooms.
I had forgotten about JCAHO, but HIPAA (Health Insurance Privacy and Accountability Act) may also have something to do with any conversion to single or double rooms with it’s stress on patient privacy. You can’t discuss a problem with a patient when others are in the same room, after all.
You really have two things driving the switch to private rooms:
Patients need to be sicker nowadays, and private rooms are more likely to be medically necessary, as well as reducing germs spread from one patient to another.
People in general expect more privacy nowadays. Most new college dorms have single bedrooms (that might share a lounge area and bathroom. It’s expected that kids have their own room. Communal showers are going away. When it looked like I might need elective surgery I selected hospital A because they had all private rooms and B did not.
Insurance in the US will generally cover the extra cost of a private room if it’s medically necessary or that’s all that’s available, as indicated by special “occurance codes” submitted on the facility claim.
Spain, the closest thing to a ward would be the “triage area” in ERs. Everything else is rooms, either double or single. Since the amount of inpatients changes a lot throughout the year (for example there are a lot more births in the spring, raising that floor’s occupancy), the general policy is to try and have people by themselves if possible, in those hospitals I’m familiar with.
All the rooms in the relatively-new hospital where my father worked are the same size, but some have two beds and some only one (the hospital was inaugurated in 1986). In older hospitals you can see places where a larger room was partitioned, and rooms which were built in different sizes. And in that newish hospital, floors where short stays, a lot of watch or a lot of visitors can be expected (ER, maternity) are “fishbowls”, with large windows to the hallway and heavy curtains in case the patient wants privacy; the curtains were electrified a few years ago so the patients can open and close them from the bed.
Outpatient, the triage area. If you’d been admitted you’d been moved to a room.