The Effect of Boarding in the ER for ICU Sepsis Patients
Abigail House MD resident, Virginia Labond MD faculty, Kimberly Barber PhD
- Abstract
- Background: It is a widely held belief that the boarding of patients in the Emergency Department, especially those of high acuity, is generally a suboptimal plan of care as referenced by many previous articles (3, 5, 8). Boarding occurs secondary to a multitude of reasons: critical staffing shortages on various hospital floors, lack of beds available, shift change and otherwise occupied staff delaying giving or receiving report.
One explanation for the suboptimal care that has been reported may lie in the fact that ED staff are trained to be accurate and efficient stabilizers and triagers of the hospital system rather than focused on continuity of care. Additionally, with regards to staffing, most staffing models assign ED nurses a patient to nurse ratio of either 3:1 or 4:1, whereas ICU nurse to patient ratio is 2:1. There are countless small cumulative factors that may contribute to the negative impact on ICU boarded patients in the emergency room such as the ED nurse to ICU provider communication system may be less robust than that at the disposal of the ICU nurse and often the physical distance from the in-house ICU provider to the ED vs the ICU. This undoubtedly is a multifactorial issue that is worth attending to (2, 3, 5, 8).
This hypothesis that longer boarding time of ICU patients in the ED may have negative effects on the patient has been studied in other settings in various ways with special attention to an array of variables but with the constant of ED boarding of ICU patients (2, 3, 5, 8). We have decided to take a unique look at the effect of ED boarding time of ICU patients with Sepsis, Severe Sepsis, and Septic Shock in a MidWest community teaching hospital via a retrospective study. According to the UpTo Date, mortality rates in sepsis are high and range between 10-40 percent (1, 6). Sepsis is also a condition that requires attentive care and close monitoring with tightly goal directed therapy, so much so that the Surviving Sepsis Campaign was rolled out in 2016 with the hopes of improving care given in this high acuity patient (7). Therefore, the concern is that these patients may be at particular risk when boarding in the ED and even more so when requiring ICU level care.
Results: Of the 392 patients studied, 195 (49.7%) are male and 197 (50.3%) are female. In regards to race, 350 (89.3%) are White/Caucasian, 36 (9.2%) are Black/African American, 1 (.3%) are Alaskan/Native American, 4 (1%) or other.
Overall, age ranged from 21-101 years old with a mean of 69.33 and standard deviation of 16.0. ED LOS ranged from 1:18 to 23:17 with a mean of 7:18 and a standard deviation of 3.3. Boarding time in the ED ranged from as little as 8m to a maximum of 264 and 40 with a mean of 5.84 and a standard deviation of 23.6. Hospital length of stay ranged from 1.93 to 1331.37 with a mean of 154.31 and a standard deviation of 180.1. In hospital mortality was found in 165 patients (42.1%) whereas 226 patients (57.7%) survived to discharge.
It was found that boarding time as well as hospital LOS were not correlated (r= 0.121; p=0.17). In the group of patients that survived to discharge, the hospital LOS was 3.12-897.15 with a mean of 152.16 and standard deviation of 158.5. Similarly for the survival group, the boarding time was 0.40-264.4 with a mean of 8.73 and a standard deviation of 35.0.
Meanwhile, in the mortality group, the hospital LOS was 1.93-806.17 with a mean of 146.09 and standard deviation of 161.4. Similarly for the survival group, the boarding time was .08-35.38 with a mean of 3.60 and a standard deviation of 5.5.
A T-test was used to see if there was a significant difference between boarding time and mortality. It was calculated that boarding time did not differ between those who died (3.60) and those who survived (8.74) (p=0.28).
An extreme outlier was identified, one patient in the survival group who had a boarding time of 264.4 while all others were < 20 in that group. The decision was made to rerun analysis with the outlier removed. Boarding time was thus changed as follows, 0.08-35.38 with a mean of 3.81 and a standard deviation of 4. It was found that precision improved. The recalculated boarding mean time of inhospital survival was 4.08 with a SD of 4.2 and of in hospital mortality mean time was 3.59 with a SD of 5.5. Therefore, the boarding time difference became even less significant (p=0.58).
A bivariate (controlling for boarding time and mortality) regression analysis was performed to control for age. It is found using this regression analysis that again, boarding time is not a significant predictor of mortality (OR= .29; p=0.58).
Using multiple regression controlling for age, it is further extrapolated that boarding time becomes even less significant when age is added (OR= .008; p=0.93). It is found that age, itself, is a significant, independent predictor of mortality (OR= 7.04; p=0.008).
Discussion: Multiple past studies have concluded that an increase in ED boarding of ICU patients is correlated with increased hospital mortality. This study, on the other hand, suggests otherwise. Without controlling for age, boarding time did not differ between those who died (3.60) and those who survived (8.74) (p=0.28). Though age was found to be an independent risk factor for mortality (OR= 7.04; p=0.008), when controlling for age, it is found again that boarding time is not a significant predictor of mortality (OR= .29; p=0.58).
There are a number of contributing factors that may have resulted in these variant findings from the robust literature available. This study was performed in a small community hospital system where policy/procedure dictates that though ICU nursing staff does not assume care of the ICU patient boarding in the ED, the ICU attending/resident team does assume care of the patient at and/or very near the time of admission to the ICU regardless of patient physical location. In some hospital systems, the ED provider continues to care for the ICU patient while the patient is in the proximity of the ED. This leads to the conflicting attention of an attending/resident provider as the ED continues to deal with influx of critical and non-critical patients that the team remains responsible in caring for in an ideally timely fashion. Perhaps, additionally, nursing staff at this particular institution where the study was performed have additional experience or training in critical care medicine. Another notable consideration is that this institution's staffing model in the ED largely has a nurse to patient ratio of 3:1 whereas staffing models in many other EDs allow for 4:1 or greater.
This study was able to take a unique look at a midwest community hospital that serves both rural and urban populations alike. It is advantageous to this particular hospital system to know and understand the effects on outcomes (mortality and hospital LOS) on ICU level sepsis patients. However, this is with the understanding that these findings do not follow general norms found in the robust literature today. It may be beneficial, though incredibly labor intensive, to additionally risk stratify patients and their subsequent outcomes as an extension of this study by controlling for co-morbidities. This hospital system does not have a heavily used ICD-10 code system for past medical, social, and surgical histories that would allow for gathering of these variables in mass. Perhaps additional control with, for example, the widely used Charleston comorbidity index, would allow for additional findings. Furthermore, it may behoove this hospital system, to look more specifically at nurse to patient ratios and effects on outcomes as this may be a very real positive factor in the outcomes of this particular study.
Sources: 1. Elixhauser A, Friedman B, Stranges E. Septicemia in U.S. Hospitals, 2009. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb122.pdf (Accessed on February 15, 2013).
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7. Slade, E., Tamber, P.S. & Vincent, JL. The Surviving Sepsis Campaign: raising awareness to reduce mortality. Crit Care 7, 1 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1186/cc1876.
8. Zhang Z, Bokhari F, Guo Y, Goyal H. Prolonged length of stay in the emergency department and increased risk of hospital mortality in patients with sepsis requiring ICU admission. Emerg Med J. 2019 Feb;36(2):82-87. doi: 10.1136/emermed-2018-208032. Epub 2018 Dec 5. PMID: 30518642. - Presented by
- Abigail House MD resident
- Institution
- Ascension Genesys






























