Thread: ERs Fail As The Nations Safety Net

ERs FAIL AS THE NATIONS SAFETY NET

Survey of doctors finds life-threatening overcrowding and long waits in emergency rooms are common.

By Mary Engel and Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
February 9, 2008

The long waits that government inspectors say endanger emergency room patients at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center can also be found in backlogged hospitals across the country, according to emergency care experts who have been trying for years to draw attention to the nation's overloaded safety net.

"Overcrowding in our emergency departments is a national crisis," said Dr. Linda Lawrence, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, an advocacy group based in Washington D.C. "We no longer have the capacity to serve as the safety net for society."

The group surveyed 1,000 emergency care physicians in September and found that one in five knew of a patient who had died because of having to wait too long for care, Lawrence said.

The death of an emergency room patient in December at Harbor-UCLA prompted California health officials, acting on behalf of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to inspect the L.A. County hospital. William Harold Jones Jr., 56, was admitted to the emergency room on Dec. 22 but left the hospital before treatment was finished. His absence went unnoticed for hours before he was found dead on a sidewalk across the street.

County officials released a statement earlier this week that said they expected Harbor-UCLA to be cited for placing patients in "immediate jeopardy."

Harbor-UCLA is the third hospital owned by Los Angeles County to undergo federal scrutiny in recent months for emergency room deaths.

"When somebody dies or somebody walks out the door and drops dead or a kid dies in the back of an ambulance, the typical press reaction is find the nurse, find the doctor, and crucify them," said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, professor and chairman of emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. "UCLA-Harbor . . . [has] been operating right on the edge in terms of volume of care for years. There's just not any room left. This is the death spiral of American medicine, if we don't figure out what to do."

Report after report has laid out the crisis.

A review of 90,000 emergency room visits nationwide from 1997 to 2004 found that one in four heart attack patients waited almost an hour after arriving in a hospital emergency room before receiving care. Heart attack patients waited 150% longer for care by the end of the study period, or 20 minutes on average, up from eight minutes in 1997, according to the Harvard Medical School study published last month in the journal Health Affairs.

The National Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academies of Science, warned in a 2006 report that hospital-based emergency care was at a breaking point because of increasing demand and dwindling numbers of both emergency rooms and hospital beds.

The declining number of inpatient beds matters because emergency patients who need to be admitted for further treatment end up "boarding" in the emergency room -- often on gurneys in hallways -- until a hospital bed becomes available. Indeed, boarding is the key driver of the emergency room crowding crisis, the report said, taking up space and attention needed to treat the next emergency and leading to backlogged waiting rooms.

The gridlock is exacerbated by a chronic, nationwide nursing shortage and a dearth of specialists willing to be on call for emergencies, as well as by an aging population with increasingly serious medical needs.

The growing number of people without medical insurance also contributes because the lack of reimbursement, along with ever-shrinking payments from both public and private insurers, has turned many emergency rooms into money-losers and driven some hospitals out of the emergency-care business. Federal law requires hospital emergency rooms to treat patients regardless of their ability to pay.

The crisis is especially acute in Los Angeles County. In the South Los Angeles area alone, six emergency rooms -- which accounted for 100,000 emergency room visits a year -- have closed since 2003. Five were at private hospitals and one was at the county-owned Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in Willowbrook, which was cited last year in the death of a woman who writhed in pain for 45 minutes on the floor of the emergency room lobby without receiving medical attention. The county closed all but the outpatient clinics and urgent care center at King-Harbor in August after the hospital failed multiple inspections and lost federal funding.

"What we have is a persistent erosion of ER services, predominantly private, and that creates increasing pressure on every other hospital that runs an emergency room," said Dr. Bruce Chernof, L.A. County's director of county health services. Although his department "can do some things to mitigate the problem," he said, "this is part of a larger issue across the county."

County health officials are expected to report on Harbor-UCLA's waiting times and triage system to county supervisors Tuesday and propose a plan to correct any weaknesses.

Lark Galloway-Gilliam, executive director of Community Health Councils, a health advocacy group, agrees that all hospitals are strained but believes that there's more to the county's problems than that.

"A lot of it has to do with management and oversight," she said, echoing critics who have long advocated that the county hand off hospital oversight to an independent authority. County supervisors "do not have the skills or the time to protect patient care when resources are so scarce."

She also said that the county brought on much of the current overcrowding, first by closing county-run clinics and more recently by shuttering King-Drew.

"We now see patients getting sicker and going to ERs, and the ERs don't have the capacity to deal with this volume and level of illness," she said. "People get overlooked, and people die."


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... 8651.story

I notice they were careful not to mention just who it is using the emergency rooms for freebie care.

Who they need to hold accountable for the deaths, and all of other problems, are all of the Reconquistas who have turned LA in an extension of Mexico, the Governor, and everyone sitting their asses in DC who has allowed this to happen and continues to allow it to happen.

There is no excuse for it and I don't care who is overseeing the operations. Until we see an end to illegal aliens abusing our system this is going to not only continue, but worsen.

I heard on the radio that Chicago is considering another tax..."wheel tax" for people who have cars in Cook country. $40. a year. They can't manage the 13% cut they are expected to do and if they don't tax they will be forced to close 2 hospitals and all county clinics.

Another sanctuary city....