<p>I think the point is that it may be distasteful but it is legally allowable to have these conversations that others can hear. You would have to have a completely different privacy law passed to mandate private rooms in ERs. The costs would be prohibitive due to lack of space and then the need for hospital expansion at a time when Bush just proposed $200 billion dollars in Medicaid/Medicare cuts. More hospitals would just close if they were mandated to have private rooms on all floors and in ERs.</p>
<p>Good for you for speaking up. As a nurse I always ask the patient if it is ok to ask questions or take their history with their family in the room. We just remodeled our ER and made it with separate rooms for each patient. It’s nice to have but not financially possible for a lot of hospitals. A letter to administration might get passed along to remind the staff to be more sensitive to patients. A lot of people do not understand what hipaa is really about. At our hospital if someone does not know a patient’s last name we have to turn them away. A lot of time it’s a family member who doesn’t remember the patients married name. Ofcourse they leave angry. I’m not sure who we are protecting by a policy like this but it’s an example of how we’ve gone overboard with hipaa and do things that don’t make a lot of sense.</p>
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Maybe but I find it hard to believe that costs would rise significantly if a hospital were designed with private rooms and privacy in mind in the first place. Maybe it’d add a percent or two to the room charge for the patient. One of the relatively newer hospitals near me has all private rooms charged at the semi-private rate and they seem to be no more expensive than any other hospital. I don’t know if this is a trend or not - I hope it is.</p>
<p>I do still remember being in a military hospital when I was a kid and being the only kid in a large ward (remember those) of men so I guess things have improved somewhat.</p>
<p>You probably live in a relatively nice area. I am familiar with the hospitals in the urban areas, several of which are closing. Even Grady is on the edge of closing. When your patient base is Medicaid, Medicare and no insurance patients, it is not even easy to stay open. Rebuilding or modernizing is not conceivable in those cases. Those hospitals serving the underserved would be greatly affected by any laws that would mandate private rooms. Many ERs have patients out in hallways due to lack of space and beds. In those cases, patients are lucky to find care, and there are no private rooms except for caridac resusitations.</p>
<p>I know that out in the (wealthy) suburbs, there is more likelihood of private rooms. There are also more insured people, however, raising room rates does not guarantee that the reimbursements will occur to the hospital.</p>
<p>The more that we go to a system of all government insurance, I think that we may all have to give up luxuries such as private rooms in health care, except for those who can make up the difference out of their own pockets.</p>
<p>Starting with basics such as trying to save public hospitals in poor areas would be a good cause for people interested in the quality of health care in the US. Longer ambulance rides to regional hospitals increase morbidity and mortality.</p>
<p>In California most the hospitals in the state have/are remodelling to meet new earthquake standards implemented after the Northridge quake. When remodelling they are going to mostly private rooms not for HIPAA reasons, but for medical reasons. Infections are the most common hospital complication, and chances of infection decrease dramatically when patients are not sharing rooms. Also, with advances in medicine, there are many, many new procedures that are preferrably done at bedside, but again, these procedures, and the equipment that comes with them, does not work well in double rooms. So HIPAA is not the driving factors for going toward more single rooms in hospitals.</p>
<p>But I do sympathize. In my husbands’ recent two years of hospitalizations I can’t tell you how many times we cringed at the amount of information we heard on his roommates. In at least one case my husband all but injured himself vaulting out of the bed to get his visiting 17 year old daughter out of the room before she heard truely distressing information about his neighbor. And we both heard the “there is nothing we can do, you need to consider hospice” speech many, many times and were so well up on that one that when his own doctor started it with him we could almost recite it word for word. I could visibly see how sharing rooms, and the information and disruption that came with that, was truely a contributor to the decline of my husband’s health several times. The depression and sense of despair that sets in is truely debilatating. All of this is hastened by the lack of sleep, and with two patients in a room with all the bedside procedures, many of them done at night, it is impossible to get a good night’s sleep. On longer stays, when I saw this happening, I was always able to get him transferred to a single room, at least for a few nights. But for those in long term situations like that, I can’t even imagine.</p>
<p>The counterargument to increasing the use of private rooms is that sometimes the patient’s roommate can be a valuable resource – perhaps the first person to spot or be able to help with a problem.</p>
<p>When I was hospitalized last year, my roommate fell while trying to get from her bed to her wheelchair. She could not get up and she could not reach her call button. But I had no trouble reaching mine. If she had been in a private room, she would have been down on the floor, uncomfortably trapped between her wheelchair and the wall, until a staff member happened to come into the room for another reason.</p>
<p>I’ve been to most of the hospitals in the San Diego area (for various family members) and all that I’ve been to except for one have the typical semi-private rooms with a few private rooms structure but the one hospital with all private rooms is just a normal public hospital but it is in a fairly okay area (Poway - Pomerado Hospital). One of the other public hospitals just had a zillion dollar bond measure pass and they’re building a brand new hospital rather than refurb the older one to earthquake standards as ‘UCDAlum’ pointed out. I don’t know if the new one will have private rooms or not - I hope so. Funny thing though - they’re going to continue to use the old hospital structure for other medical purposes so I must be missing some details about the earthquake excuse - ahhh reason, to build the new one. </p>
<p>I understand that refurbing an existing semi-private into private would be expensive but it doesn’t seem that a newly constructed hospital would cost much more to build with privates in the first place. </p>
<p>The point about infection control is a very good one as is the privacy issue and also the idea of at least a little bit of peace and quiet without having double the amount of nurse, doctor, visitor, orderly, etc. people rotating through the room every few minutes all day and night.</p>
<p>“Funny thing though - they’re going to continue to use the old hospital structure for other medical purposes so I must be missing some details about the earthquake excuse - ahhh reason, to build the new one.”</p>
<p>Presumably, the old space can be converted to day clinics, or research offices, or other places where able-bodied folks can evacuate, if necessary. The earthquake safe building will be where the ventilator dependent, non-ambulatory folks will have a decent chance of survival.</p>
<p>^^ You might be right - here’s what they say -
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