united-states health disabilities
Do hospitals have to provide wheelchairs to patients and visitors?
<p>I was performing a project at a hospital on the number of missing wheelchairs. Must hospitals provide wheelchairs at the entrance per ADA regulation or some other regulation?</p>

<p>Hospitals in the U.S. are required by the ADA to provide reasonable accommodations to the disabled and are also required by standards of medical practice to provide medical care in a manner recognized as adequate in the medical profession.</p>

<p>This does not automatically and necessarily mean that wheel chairs are required or that any specific number of them are required in any particular place.</p>

<p>In practice, most hospitals need to have wheel chairs on hand to meet these general obligations, because lots of people who come to most hospitals need the assistance of a wheel chair to adequately utilize the services of the hospital and to receive adequate medical care. </p>

<p>But, this isn't a rigid regulation. </p>

<p>One can imagine circumstances where a hospital with a niche group of patients of some kind didn't need them. </p>

<p>For example, ambulatory surgery centers, which aren't strictly hospitals, but could be easily confused for them or described as a hospital in loose layman's terminology, which provide outpatient surgical services, often provide wheel chairs on the way out, but not on the way in, as they deal with pre-planned, rather than emergency surgeries.</p>

<p>One could also imagine a psychiatric hospital where a wheel chair in an entry area wasn't necessary or useful.</p>
