(Jon Cherry/Bloomberg)
The United States may face a shortage of hospital beds by 2032, a recent analysis in JAMA Network Open warns.
The study found that hospital admissions have remained 11 percentage points higher since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic and that an aging population and dwindling number of hospital beds because of labor shortages and hospital closures could exacerbate the problem.
Researchers used weekly hospital occupancy data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services between 2020 and 2024, when the agency required the reporting as part of coronavirus tracking. The data offers “unprecedented insight” into the hospital bed supply, the researchers write, and paints a picture of a potential future crisis.
Using Census Bureau population projections, the researchers calculated future hospital bed use between 2025 and 2035.
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Between 2009 and 2019, they found, mean hospital occupancy was 63.9 percent, rising to 75.3 percent in 2024. During the same time, staffed hospital beds fell from a mean of 802,000 to 674,000.
By 2035, the researchers project, annual hospitalizations will rise from 36 million in 2025 to 40 million in 2035 because of the aging U.S. population, with a national occupancy of about 85 percent of available staffed adult beds.
That would constitute a shortage, the researchers write, with the “dangerous threshold” arriving as soon as 2032.
When 85 percent of hospital beds are occupied, two emergency medicine and health-care outcomes experts write in an accompanying editorial, “basic hospital operations can become dysfunctional and even unsafe.” Without a concerted attempt to build more capacity, reduce hospitalizations or convert existing beds for acute care, they warn, “ill and injured U.S. residents should expect increasingly overloaded hospitals incapable of delivering the quality and access to affordable care to which we aspire.”
Increasing the rate of staffed hospital beds or reducing the occupancy rate by just 10 percent over the next decade could offset the crisis, the researchers in the underlying study write. But the editorial’s authors warn that it can take years to increase hospital infrastructure and that an “older and more medically complex” population may exacerbate the problem.