Ridurre il sovraffollamento in Pronto Soccorso senza disporre di più posti letto? Discharge Room come soluzione praticabile

Overcrowding in Emergency Departments is one of the most important issues facing nationwide. The aim of our paper is to examine how to improve patients flow through optimization of hospital beds. To improve discharging processes and patients flow during the entire day, a new co-department was created, called “Discharge Room”, a wide functional area for patients discharged from the hospital that are waiting family members or an ambulance. After Discharge Room creation the percentage of patients who found a bed in a specialist department within 4 hours after a complete clinical stabilization performed in ED increased from 75% to 82.5%.