When thinking about how the acute care environment is affected by the aging baby boomer population, the logical conclusion is to assume that the number of patients needing care is dramatically increasing. While this is true, there is an equally pressing problem with the number of baby boomers retiring from the healthcare profession.
As the baby boomers continue to retire, the nursing shortage continues to grow. There simply are not enough nurses to replace the ones who are leaving the profession. To top that off, hospitals are more concerned than ever with the amount of time a nurse is spending with a patient.
Studies have shown that there is an inverse correlation with the amount of time a nurse spends with a patient and the length of their stay. The more time spent, the shorter the patient’s stay. The shorter the stay, the more patients the hospital can treat. And the more patients a hospital can treat, the more reimbursements they will see from Medicare and Medicaid.
The less time nurses spend searching for supplies or specifically running to the medication room to pick up the patient’s meds, the more time the nurse will spend with the patient.
Typically the pharmacy receives the patient orders for the day, stocks a cart with the meds for all the patients on a floor, wheels it up to that floor and puts it in a locked medication or clean supply room. In an effort to eliminate the nurses going from supply room to patient room, back to supply room… hospitals are putting the onus on the pharmacy to get the meds to the patient room. Theoretically this allows the nurse to now go from room to room to room.
The biggest challenge is securing the medication. The storage can range from a small locked box that only holds the medication all the way up to a 76” high pull out nurse server cabinets that can store 80% of the patient’s supplies.
No matter if the bedside storage needs are big or small, Patterson Pope is here to help.