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PROFESSIONAL ISSUESIs this trip really necessary? Emergency departments face overcrowdingEDs see increasing numbers of patients. Primary care doctors can help trim the load.By Bonnie Booth, AMNews staff. Sept. 8, 2003. More than 107 million people sought care in the nation's 4,045 hospital emergency departments in 2001. They arrived in ambulances, sport utility vehicles, cars, taxis and buses. Some likely rode the subway. They sought treatment for all sorts of ailments -- abdominal pain, chest pain, injury, fever, headache and respiratory infection, to name a few. Some sought care in the emergency department at the urging of their primary care physicians while others thought the emergency physicians were their primary care doctors. For some of these patients, a primary care physician -- by timing or their own design -- just was not a part of the scenario that brought them to the ED. But all 107 million of them had one thing in common. They were part of a problem with no simple solution: Emergency department overcrowding. The number of patient visits to emergency departments has increased 12.7% since 1997, according to the American Hospital Assn. But that is not the sole reason for the overcrowding. Other factors that contribute to the crisis, according to the American College of Emergency Physicians, include physician and nurse shortages, a growing elderly population and the "boarding" of patients in emergency departments because there is no room for admissions. Absent from the college's list is people who show up at the ED without "true" emergencies." Slightly more than 9% of the people who received ED care in 2001, the most recent year for which statistics are available, were triaged by ED nurses as nonurgent (needing care within two to 24 hours.) That translates to nearly 9.8 million visits. [...]Full text of AMNews content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
Copyright 2003 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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