Maybe because patients don’t want to be in an “Ebola” hospital?
Have you heard that after Duncan died, Texas Presbyterian became like a ghost town, and many patients cancelled elective surgery?
Or perhaps it is the hospital’s liability insurer who has requested these changes.
That may be what they're not telling us. It sure isn't the reason given. The reason given is so that they can be prepared for more Ebola cases. If the patient agrees with or requested the transfer, then that's fine. But it still requires a whole lot of work and isn't begin done just to make space available for patients who may or may not come.
Have you heard that after Duncan died, Texas Presbyterian became like a ghost town, and many patients cancelled elective surgery?
This is why just a few hundred cases of Ebola in this country may very well bring the healthcare system in the U.S. to its knees. If that's what's really happening at Bellevue--it could be--and what happened at Texas Health Presbyterian, then I think it's likely that it'll happen at any other hospital that gets an Ebola patient, and we're in for a bumpy ride.
Or perhaps it is the hospital’s liability insurer who has requested these changes.
Another possibility. But I don't think the hospital's liability insurer has the right to demand that critically ill patients be moved from one hospital to another. That doesn't mean, though, that they wouldn't/couldn't jack up the cost of the liability insurance.
In any case, to justify the move of a critically ill patient to another hospital, it needs to be in THAT PATIENT'S best interest. Not in the hospital's, and not in some other patient's best interest, much less some "possible" future patient's best interest.
So if Bellevue is making these transfers, they're not doing it lightly. They know something they're not telling us. It could be that patients and their families are demanding the transfers. It could be that the liability insurers at Bellevue threatened to jack up the rates unless they got all other patients out of the unit. It could be many things. But it's something more than preparing for the possibility of more Ebola patients.