New Boston, Cape hospital beds backed
Massachusetts General Hospital and Cape Cod Hospital will be able to add over 100 hospital beds, the Public Health Council determined — allowing the critically overflowing facilities to respond to growing statewide capacity issues.
“The patients are already here on our campus,” said David Brown, president of Mass General Brigham’s Academic Medical Centers at yesterday’s meeting. “They’re in our hallways, in our emergency departments, and we’ve deployed teams of care providers to care for them. Those care providers will migrate with the patients to the expanded capacity beds upstairs if this amendment is approved and when those beds come online.”
The Public Health Council approved 94 additional hospital beds for Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston and 32 new beds for Cape Cod Hospital (CCH) in Hyannis.
The facilities expansion comes as hospitals statewide are facing increasing capacity challenges, especially in light of the closure of some Steward hospitals and ongoing threat of closure facing others throughout the state owned by the financially crippled private company.
MGH previously requested the additional capacity as part of a $1.9 billion expansion project in 2019 but was denied the additional beds due to concerns over the hospital’s increased market share and spending. The PHC approval amends that decision.
Representatives from both hospitals painted a disastrous picture of the hospitals’ capacity concerns in recent years at the council meeting yesterday.
In fiscal year 2019, MGH reached “Code Help” or “Capacity Disaster” status, in terms of how many patients the hospital could not make room for, 25% of the time, hospital representatives presented at the meeting. In FY 2023, the hospital reached those critical statuses 93% of the time.
In FY 2019, the hospital’s capacity was near the industry standard with about 85% of the main campus’s beds filled, MGH representatives said. In FY 2023, the number shot up to about 96%.
Cape Cod Hospital similarly reported a 91% average occupancy rate from FY 2021 to FY 2023.
Between FY 2019 and FY 2023, MGH detailed, the average wait time for a bed at the hospital increased from 12 hours to 20 hours.
At CCH, the number of patients who waited in the emergency room for 12 hours or more wat 1,490 in FY 2021, representatives said. In FY 2022, that number was 2,403 patients.
In 2023 at MGH, about 5,000 patients left the hospital without being seen, representatives said. An estimated 10% of those patients would likely have been admitted.
“So we’re talking about 500 patients who ended up potentially deferring or hopefully getting care elsewhere,” said Ali Raja, MGH executive vice chair of the department of emergency medicine, noting that some “just don’t get care at all.”