Delayed discharge as a block of beds, not a sentence
On a 32-bed medical ward, three patients already marked medically ready are not a footnote. They are a side room you no longer have.
Hospital reports in Georgia often mention delayed discharge in a closing paragraph: “some patients remain after they are medically ready.” The sentence is true and almost useless in a twenty-minute board. Three beds held on a 32-bed ward are a tenth of the ward. That is a side room, or a bay, depending on how the ward is laid out.
When Nino walks Ward 4 at 07:00, she is not counting diagnoses. She is asking the nurse in charge which patients are waiting for a family, a rehabilitation place, or a late pharmacy supply. If those names cannot be tied to a timestamp without using a clinical file, we stop. We will not reconstruct a delay from memory alone. We will draw only the delays the ward can stand behind.
The useful drawing is crude: occupancy as a bar, and a shaded block the size of the delayed beds. Directors point at the block. They do not have to interpret a percentage. In one Saburtalo hospital the block was equal to a side room; the director had been describing “pressure” for a year without that picture.
The second useful fact is when the delay starts. A medically-ready time recorded at 11:00 on Friday is a different problem from a time recorded on Monday after a weekend with no discharge clerk. If you do not record the time at all, the drawing will show occupancy without a shaded block, and the note will say why. Pretending to shade beds you cannot date is how a briefing loses the room.