Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

16 PATIENT SAFETY & OUTCOMES ED boarding times hit unsafe levels when hospitals face capacity strain: study By Erica Carbajal D uring the first year of the pandemic, emergency department patients who were awaiting to be admitted were held in the ED for a median of 6.58 hours, exceeding the four-hour period recommended by e Joint Commission, according to findings published Sept. 30 in JAMA Network Open. Researchers from New Haven, Conn.-based Yale University and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor analyzed data from a voluntary peer benchmarking service offered by Epic that was collected from January 2020 to December 2021. Hospitals reporting benchmarking data increased as the pandemic went on, rising from 1,289 in January 2020 to 1,769 in December 2021. Researchers found that when hospital occupancy was greater than 85 percent, ED boarding time exceeded the four-hour standard 88.9 percent of the time. e Joint Commission lists boarding — which oen means patients are waiting to be admitted in hallways — a patient safety risk that shouldn't exceed four hours, researchers said. "Downstream harms include medical errors, compromises to patient privacy and increased mortality," the report said. n COVID-19 ages organs, compilation of studies finds By Nika Schoonover R esearch shows COVID-19 may age organs, according to a series of studies compiled by Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at Washington University in St. Louis and the chief of research and education service at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System. The studies on long COVID-19 in the brain, heart and kidneys all pointed to multiple human organs aging faster after COVID-19. The majority of these effects was found in people who were hospitalized but also appeared in individuals with mild COVID-19 symptoms. "You can start thinking about getting COVID as almost an accelerant to aging. The viral infection accelerates the aging process in people," Dr. Al-Aly told ABC News. Michael Peluso, MD, infectious disease specialist at University of California San Francisco, was part of one of the first teams in the country to begin long COVID-19 research in April 2020. He said his team thinks some of the reason organs may be experiencing aging or injury after COVID-19 include the persistence of the virus, which leads to the longer-term effects. Though more data is needed, Dr. Al-Aly said he believes and hopes the aging will eventually stop. "There are some early indications that this really may be the case that the risk or the kidney function decline really flattens out with time," Dr. Al-Aly said. n COVID-19 tied to worse outcomes for trauma patients, even if asymptomatic By Mackenzie Bean E ven when asymptomatic, trauma patients with COVID-19 may be at greater risk of complications compared to those without the infection, according to research from LAC+USC Medical Center in Los Angeles. Researchers analyzed the outcomes of 185 asymptomatic COVID-19-positive patients and 554 COVID-19-negative patients admitted to the medical center for trauma care between March 2020 and October 2021. Trauma patients who tested positive for the virus but showed no symptoms had significantly higher rates of cardiac events, longer hospital stays and higher hospital charges, researchers found. For example, the rate of myocardial infarction and cardiac arrest was 3.2 percent among patients with COVID-19 compared to 0.9 percent for the control group. Researchers said the study reinforces the need to screen all trauma patients for COVID-19. "Simply put, you don't have to have symptoms for the virus to potentially affect your body," lead author Marco Sozzi, MD, a research fellow at LAC+USC Medical Center, said in a news release. "Further studies will need to look at further indicators that may put patients at risk." Study authors presented the findings at the American College of Surgeons' 2022 Clinical Congress held Oct. 16- 20 in San Diego, Calif. n

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