I was monitoring the care of an elderly person with dementia who was in her late 80's who had been admitted to a General Hospital when there was nowhere else to take her. The medical chief of staff told me that hospitals are not primary care facilities for the elderly nor are they care facilities for the young, but instead are acute care facilities that are awash with infectious diseases of unknown sources through no fault of their own.
The reason the elderly woman could not stay there for any longer than absolutely necessary was because she would eventually become very ill he told me, irrespective of the fact that she had no physical ailments nor inability to walk without assistance when she was first admitted there.
Case in point, the chief of staff told me that his own father was admitted to that same hospital a year earlier for the same reason of having dementia and living alone in his home, but then was taken out of his home and was under his direct care as his father's primary care Physician.
His father then died while under his care within 5 days of being admitted to that hospital from C. difficile infection which he said his father contracted while simply being in that acute care hospital AND receiving NO treatment at all the whole time he was there, but was only there occupying a hospital bed while awaiting a permanent Long-Term Care bed at a facility down the road.
If you're not sick when you get admitted to an acute care hospital, you'll end up sick before you're discharged, is what that Physician's bottom line was to me.
