Intelligence Unit
Special Reports
Special Events
Subscribe
Sponsored
Departments
- Leadership
- Finance
- Technology
- Physicians
- Community Hospitals
- Health Plans
- Marketing
- Quality
- Nursing
- HR
Follow Us
ACEP Chief Rails Against ED Diversions, Scheduling
It's a fact that hospitals and policy makers should not ignore.
This alarming statistic about ED overcrowding – and others equally grim – came from a large population study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The research paper gives Sandra Schneider, MD, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians and an ED doc at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y. a chance to make some additional points about how the system must change to save lives.
For starters, hospital executives and consumer groups need to realize that it's not just heart attack patients who are more likely to die when EDs are on diversion, she says. It's patients with any critical illness – pneumonia, stroke, injuries or wounds from violence, "or any other condition where it's important to get treatment early." The circumstance of diversion has implications for patients who were already admitted to the hospital that sends ambulances elsewhere, because chances are staff is already too strapped to provide them with optimal care, she says.
WEBCAST: Transform Your ED into a Profit Center June 23, 1:00 – 2:30 ET Register today
Additional studies should document the casualties of those other medical conditions as well, she suggested.
When I asked her to comment on the JAMA study this week, Schneider seemed to not want to get off the phone. "I'm passionate about this because I'm the one who has to watch patients die," she says. "There's absolutely no question in my mind, and the mind of every emergency physician out there, that holding inpatients in the emergency room and backing things up … leads to ambulance diversion. It's just bad. It causes death; it causes delays in care; it causes increased discomfort."
- Patient Harm Data to Remain on Medicare's Hospital Compare Site
- Quiet ORs Better for Patient Safety
- Tavenner Confirmed as CMS Administrator
- Leapfrog Hospital Safety Scores 'Depressing'
- CMS Seeks to 'Rapidly Reduce' Medicare Spending with $1B in Grants
- Building a Better Healthcare Board
- Hard-Nosed About Physician Teamwork
- Case Study: Advance Care Conversations
- Healthcare Leaders Sound Off on Organized Labor
- Esther Dyson's Population Health Dream
Comments are moderated. Please be patient.
Sam Breneiser (6/16/2011 at 7:55 PM)
Thank you for the very good article on E D crowding and issues. Since the newsletter indicates you are in California, I am curious of you mentioned our legislated staffing ratios to Dr Schneider? Here in California hospitals are barred from the choice of flexibility the two of you advocate in the article. To that extent I think you missed an opportunity to point out that excessive health care regulation is also not the solution – it is not the "health care system" of the U.S. that [INVALID]d those regulations, it was very well meaning but deeply misguided legislators – the legal and political system - that imposed those rules here in California. I think your point was that in order to improve health care outcomes we all need to pull our heads out of our respective standard operating procedure boxes and engage in creative thinking to respond appropriately. I just don't agree that its solely the health care system causing the problem, nonetheless it is ours to clean up.