Woman waits over 24 hours in emergency room to get bed at Lee’s Summit hospital

By Andy Alcock

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    LEE’S SUMMIT, Misouri (KMBC) — A company with seven regional hospitals is experiencing long wait times in emergency rooms and a bed shortage.

John Morris brought his wife Vickie to Lee’s Summit Medical Center Tuesday morning due to breathing problems.

John said Vickie is a stage four lung cancer patient who needed a couple days in the hospital.

“She was in the emergency room area. She was the only patient. But the whole area was full of people waiting for rooms. They’ve got them in hallways out there,” John said.

After a more than a 24 hour wait, a short time after KMBC 9 News spoke to John and started asking questions, Vickie was able to get a hospital room.

John said Vickie was treated in the ER, but there’s only one bathroom for everybody waiting there.

“I did ask why did you not send us somewhere else if you didn’t have a place for them? And their answer was, well, there’s no rooms anywhere,” John said.

Nick Adams, Vice-president Marketing and Corporate Affairs for HCA Midwest Health issued a statement.

It says:

“Several HCA Midwest Health hospitals are experiencing a high volume of emergency room patients this week, as well as a high volume of inpatients. There is no single cause for the increase in volume – it is not unusual to see slight increases or decreases in demand over time. When there is an increase in patient demand, there can sometimes be a delay in admitting that patient from the ER to an inpatient room. On the rare occasions when that occurs, we have processes in place to ensure those patients receive the same high-quality, compassionate care in the ER as they would in an inpatient room. And we work very hard to place those patients in an inpatient room as soon as possible.

While we cannot speak to any one patient’s experience in order to maintain patient privacy, we do apologize for any delay that any patient receives in being admitted, and we are always working on ways to improve our capacity, processes and patient experience.”

The issues HCA Midwest Health hospitals are experiencing don’t appear to be a metro-wide problem.

A spokesman for the University of Kansas Health Systems said the hospital has beds available and nobody is being turned away.

A spokesman for the Missouri Hospital Association said that organization’s real time data Wednesday showed there were five or six metro hospitals experiencing heavy emergency room traffic.

He said it’s a good indicator of how many beds would also be available at those hospitals, but there’s no specific data on available beds.

He also said with dozens of other hospitals in the metro, it’s not unusual for some hospitals to have patient surges.

John believes KMBC 9 News asking questions helped Vickie get a room more quickly than she might have otherwise.

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