Readers speak: A serious threat to patient safety in health care

Hartford Courant – Saturday, June 6, 2026
By Letters to the Editor

The experiences described in the recent letter, “Something’s wrong when your 97-year-old CT grandfather is left in a hospital hallway,” are heartbreaking, but unfortunately not unique. As an emergency physician in Connecticut, I can say with certainty that emergency department boarding has become one of the most serious threats to patient safety in health care today.

When admitted patients remain in emergency departments for hours or days awaiting inpatient beds, research shows increased mortality, delayed treatment, worsened outcomes, medical complications, and dangerous overcrowding. For elderly patients, prolonged stays in hallways increase the risks of delirium, falls, sleep deprivation, loss of dignity, and prolonged recovery.

Boarding is not fundamentally an emergency department problem. It is a hospital capacity and throughput problem. Emergency physicians do not control inpatient staffing, discharge bottlenecks, rehabilitation placement delays, or bed availability, yet emergency departments absorb the consequences when hospitals operate beyond capacity.

Hospitals and policymakers must treat boarding as a patient safety emergency. Last year, the Connecticut College of Emergency Physicians launched a first of its kind Boarding Dashboard to encourage transparency on the nature of boarding within our state. Together, a collaborative effort can create meaningful operational changes, including improved staffing, hospital-wide throughput initiatives, earlier discharge planning, expanded post-acute care resources, and greater accountability from leadership.

CCEP and ACEP continue to advocate for policies and reforms that protect patients and healthcare workers alike. Boarding cannot simply be normalized because it has become common.

Daniel Freess, MD, FACEP, member, board of directors, American College of Emergency Physicians.

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