General Discussion

If more rural hospitals close, it will affect suburban and urban hospitals too, as rural folks are forced to go to cities for care.

We have a lot of large hospitals where I live (suburban area around KC), and they’re already struggling to accommodate patients in the ER.

My husband was boarded in the ER for nearly 20 hours after being admitted to inpatient care. There were no beds. And talking to the ER staff, this is not a new issue.

There were many patients being treated in the halls, for hours and hours. We were lucky my husband (a cancer patient) had gotten the last private ER room.

I would have thought this was an issue with this specific hospital had the same problem not occurred to a friend a few weeks earlier at a different major hospital in our area.

While my guess is the ER-boarding / lack of beds is more of a post-Covid issue (health care workers—feel free to chime in!), it certainly won’t be helped by rural hospital closures.