The flu outbreak has overwhelmed every hospital and ER it has hit. I received a letter yesterday from the CEO of our own healthcare system sent out to all healthcare staff thanking us for the hard work during this crisis. There were no ICU beds available anywhere, they were all full and ICU patients were cared for on the regular floors as best as possible.

HOWEVER what this article doesn't mention is that illegal immigrants are still overburdening our healthcare facilities and clinics, add to that the time we spend having to obtain interpreters for them. EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) needs to be reformed, hospitals should NOT have to care for earaches and toothaches in our ERs! We cannot afford people dying because of delays in care due to people who have no business in the ERs.

Tucson emergency rooms in life-and-death crunch
Critical-care workers admit they're overwhelmed, and some desperate patients spend hours waiting
By Carla McClain
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.16.2008
For eight long, agonizing hours, the young woman sat beside her husband in a Tucson emergency room, terrified as he fought unbearable pain and struggled to breathe.
She begged the people in charge for help. She was told to go sit down. It would be many more hours. There were many people ahead of them who already had waited far longer.
When her husband, 39-year old Rob Sweitzer, was finally summoned to see a doctor — at 2:30 a.m. — it was too late.
His lungs were full of blood. His body was shutting down. His heart stopped twice. They resuscitated him once, but it failed a second time. He died in the ER, most likely of a severe — and untreated — infection.
"I was completely helpless the entire time we were there. There was just nowhere to turn, nowhere to go to get help for Rob," said his wife, Rachel Sweitzer.
"You go to the emergency room because you need emergency care. But you can't get it. It's horrible. It's broken. And this is the United States."
Hospital officials have declined to comment specifically on what went wrong that night, saying the case remains under internal review.
But if Rachel Sweitzer's pleas indeed were ignored that night, that is "totally unacceptable," said St. Mary's spokeswoman Letty Ramirez.
"What happened was so incredibly unusual, so sudden and shocking and disturbing to everybody here," she said.
While this tragedy was unfolding on a recent Saturday night in Tucson, just a few miles away another couple, David and Bette Lou Holstein, packed their belongings, preparing to leave this desert city they had grown to love in the past six years.
They too, have endured six- and eight-hour waits in Tucson ERs. David Holstein has multiple sclerosis but could not find a specialist in that disorder. He has had to wait weeks, sometimes months, to see a neurologist or other specialist, despite acute MS attacks. He was sent instead to the ER. He could not get doctors to answer the phone, to call him back, to even refill a prescription, without begging for days.
The Holsteins finally gave up. They felt unsafe here.
"Why are such bad things happening to us?" asked Bette Lou Holstein, who once saw Tucson as the perfect place to retire with her husband. "Why can't we access the health-care system when we need it?"
They asked doctors and nurses what they were doing wrong.
"They told us, 'Nothing.' They all agreed it's a mess, but they said you can't do anything about it," she said.
"We moved to Tucson from Pennsylvania because the winters are mild and healthy. We met wonderful people, made special friends, life was good. Now, because our world in Arizona seems so unhealthy, so uncaring and in such a shambles, we must go back to the snows of Pennsylvania.
"We don't want to leave. But this is health care we're talking about. Why is it not a priority here? It's very frightening."
Beyond the tipping point
Strong evidence is mounting that Tucson's overcrowded, overwhelmed and understaffed ERs have reached crisis level, struggling to safely handle the daily load, unable to handle any new strains at all.
Our emergency physicians are pleading for help. In a letter to the editor printed in the Arizona Daily Star 10 days ago, Dr. Ken Iserson — at University Medical Center — said the current flu outbreak has pushed the city's ERs, including his own, to the "tipping point," putting "our lives at risk."
This, even though we can pretty much predict a flu outbreak, to some degree, every winter. We still can't handle it, they admit.
Rob Sweitzer died Feb. 10 at a packed ER across town also beyond its tipping point, at St. Mary's Hospital.
This meltdown of emergency care is happening throughout the United States, for a complex and cascading series of reasons: a severe shortage of surgeons and specialty doctors willing to do ER duty, a shortage of nurses and ER staff, a shortage of inpatient beds to get emergency patients out of the ER and into the hospital, too many uninsured patients with nowhere else to go, long waits for doctors' appointments that force non-emergency patients to clog the ERs when they're sick, and a huge and aging baby boomer population now needing more emergency care, to name the worst.
But these problems appear to be significantly more acute in Southern Arizona than elsewhere in the nation — and affect our entire health-care system here — a series of studies, affirmed by patient case histories, shows.
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