Where Will All the Sick Children Go?

(MedPageToday) A surge in viral infections among kids is straining hospital capacity across the country. On January 20 of this year, Tufts Medical Center announced it would be closing all inpatient pediatric care as of July 1. The current pediatric areas would be given over to adult services. The plan was to maintain the level 3 neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to support obstetrics as well as the subspecialties (medical and surgical) that the NICU would require. Without a general inpatient unit or pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) to support training, our pediatric residency was pulled from the Match. Inpatient care would be transferred to Boston Children’s Hospital and the current trainees would finish up there. At this time, the inpatient service was at or near full service capacity and had been for months. Like many pediatric units, “full” referred to our staffing capacity and not our certified bed capacity. As a result, although our rooms were full, we still did not show full occupancy because our single-patient rooms were originally double rooms.