Perugia Hospital: the “Cingolo” bed management project consolidated

The project called “Cingulum” aimed at the systematic management of beds in the medical area department.

The new internal reorganization, consolidated to date, consists in the systematic management of the flow of urgent, therefore acute, patients who access the emergency room daily and who immediately need a bed in the medical facilities. With a programmed organizational logic, each department/facility makes 10% of its beds available to the Emergency Department every morning (approximately 25 total beds) and in doing so the acute patients who access the Emergency Department are certain of being admitted to a dedicated room for the pathology evaluated. On the other hand, the Emergency Department manages urgent accesses in an organized and punctual manner so that the person receives the most appropriate hospitalization based on the degree of urgency detected, committing to respecting the assigned number of beds.

At the basis of the project “track” there is national scientific literature which estimates that 10% of daily availability of beds to be dedicated to the medical area based on calculations based on the study of urgent hospitalization flows over the last ten years.

Fundamental healthcare figures in the new way of working are the bed manager and the “liaison” nurses who serve in the emergency room. The bed manager is the healthcare facilitator between the demand and supply of acute beds, he is the one who collects the needs of the emergency room together with the connecting nurses, and interfaces with the departments/facilities to best organize the room and the bed space based on the person’s time-dependent pathology; 365 days a year, from 8.00 to 21.00.

The weekly supervision of the progress of hospitalization flows is carried out by the Health Management, together with the professionals of the structures, the Emergency Room and the Medical Management.

“In these six months – underlines the doctor. Arturo Pasqualucci, medical director of the Perugia Hospital – we noted numerous advantages for citizens in implementing the project, first and foremost the almost total absence of additional beds in the wards during the day. Previously there were no regulations, the beds became saturated quickly and sometimes patients were temporarily placed in the wards before the room became free. Today, however, there is a continuous organized turnover of beds in medicines and the word “track” indicates that mechanism of continuous discharge and hospitalization on free beds starting in the morning. The phenomenon of overcrowding has been greatly reduced and we are working to perfect the system. For an inpatient hospital, knowing in advance the number of patients arriving from the emergency room is essential to better organize the work in the ward, – continues Pasqualucci – in fact, another advantage is that of having a virtuous hospital stay, with clinical-care activities aimed at satisfying the person’s urgent health needs. The implementation of the project, now well-established, was possible thanks to the great collaboration of healthcare professionals, both medical and nursing staff, whom I would like to publicly thank for having changed their way of working and having generated a participatory and confrontational climate, open to proposed organizational innovations”.