PHILADELPHIA – An Institute of Medicine report released Wednesday says the nation’s emergency system is overcrowded and underfunded, with patients waiting for hours to be seen and days for a hospital bed.
The report included three main targets: the nation’s emergency rooms, its emergency medical system and pediatric care. The institute’s report states that in 2003, more than 114 million patients visited emergency rooms – a 26 percent increase from the past decade. At the same time, 703 hospitals closed.
The problems stem from the general aging of the population, an increase in the number of uninsured, and from a lack of regular doctor’s hours at night and on weekends, said Gail Warden, former head of the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit and chair of the IOM committee.
“It does impact patient care,” said Warden. “If you’re waiting four, eight, nine hours on a gurney, that’s not the best way to take care of a patient who is ill.”
Glenn McGee, an emergency room physician at Albert Einstein Healthcare Network in Philadelphia, said that the hospital doubled its square footage two years ago to accommodate the more than 70,000 patients a year that come through the emergency department doors. The numbers have increased as much as 10 percent a year for the past decade, he said.
“The emergency department has become the safety net for the healthcare system,” McGee said. “We’re now seeing patients that before would be cared for in a primary care physician’s office but they’ve delayed care or can’t get in to see them.”
About half of the people who come through the emergency room doors are considered “urgent,” meaning that they require life-saving intervention, according to the report.
But that’s not solely the fault of a lazy patient who just doesn’t want to take off of work to go to the doctor. At a conference to discuss the report, one doctor described a woman who had come to the emergency room to get her prescription refilled.
“She had gone to four clinics in two days to get it refilled, but couldn’t get a doctor to see her,” said Arthur Kellermann, professor and chair of emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “Finally someone told her to go to the emergency room.”
Comments are no longer available on this story