The efficiency in the ordinary hospital bed management in Italy: an in-depth analysis of intensive care unit in the areas affected by COVID-19 before the outbreak

Fabrizio Pecoraro; Fabrizio Clemente; Daniela Luzi

In conclusion this study highlights that in the recent years there has been no substation reduction of the hospital beds located in the intensive care units. Differently other wards suffered of the financial cuts done by national and regional governments to the public health. However, this trend may also take into account two important factors. On the one hand, the provision of health services is now shifting from formal institutional facilities (e.g. hospitals) to home care and, on the other hand, different scheduled procedures are mainly provided in a day hospital reducing the number of beds needed to treat the patients. The majority of the Italian regions and in particular those in the northern part of the country can rely on an appropriate number of beds that generally do not saturate in periods when the patient flow is not conditioned by catastrophic events like what we have been going through these weeks. This availability of hospital beds as well as the efficiency in their management confirmed in this study allow hospitals to treat patients without the risk of having an overabundance of patients and a scarcity of beds. In fact, the analysis reported in this paper showed that, in normal situations, the management of hospital and intensive care beds has no critical levels, while in pandemic or other catastrophic periods, the hospital management paradigms change [18] . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.