Background: Structural inequities in healthcare are widespread and best documented in racial and income related inequalities to care. Prior studies show macro level differences in access to healthcare, insurance and medications as explanations for healthcare inequities. The opening of a second hospital in a suburban academic center with entirely private patient rooms presented a rare opportunity to assess intrahospital healthcare disparities between patients assigned to private versus shared rooms. There is some evidence that patients in private rooms have improved quality of sleep, lower level of noise exposure, improved patient- physician communication, and reduced nosocomial infections. We sought to determine whether there were any racial differences in patients assigned to private versus shared rooms.
Methods: We conducted a retrospective observational study at a large suburban tertiary care academic hospital. All patients discharged between January 2021 through May 2021 were identified for inclusion in the study. All statistical analyses were completed with minitab 2020 software, binary logistic regressions were used to analyze the relationship between room assignment (single or double) and race.
Results: There were a total number of 11,621 total discharges from January through May 2021, of which 9527 (89.8%) were included in the study. 9,025 patients (94.7%) were discharged from a private room and 499 patients (5.2%) were discharged from a shared room. In unadjusted analyses Asians and African Americans were more likely than white patients to be in shared rooms, after controlling for the medical discharge service, there was no statistically significant relationship between race and room type.
Conclusions: Our study suggests that unequal racial distribution of patients to single versus shared rooms may reflect the racial distribution of patients assigned to a subspecialty services versus medicine services. These findings warrant further study to determine how service line placement may affect patient outcomes.
