How Many Beds in Missouri’s Largest Hospital? It’s Staggering

Without boring you with a long story, I will share that I once won a contest guessing how many jellybeans were in a jar. That talent has not carried over to guessing how many beds are in Missouri's largest hospital. The true number is actually staggering.

I saw this interesting ranking of Missouri's largest hospitals by Yahoo Finance today based on numbers that originated from Global Data. They ranked the top 10, but I'd like to focus just on number one. It's Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, by the way. How many beds would you guess are in this huge Missouri medical complex? Aim high...

The number of beds in Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis is 1,278. In the article it says that they cared for 52,982 patients in just one calendar year and that's not even including the large number of emergency room visits from guys like me that accidentally step on a George Foreman Grill. Yes, I am the Missouri version of Michael Scott from The Office.

For the sake of scope, the next largest hospital in Missouri compared to Barnes is  Mercy Hospital in Springfield that has 886 beds which is still a large number. It's just not even close to what Barnes-Jewish Hospital has.