Hospital Buyer

The Subcommittee on Bioterrorism & Public Health Preparedness of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions organized a roundtable yesterday about how ready American emergency departments are to cope with extraordinary events such as natural disasters or major terrorist attacks. It heard testimonies from executives from the American College of Emergency Physicians, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the Emergency Nurses Association and other organizations. Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the subcommittee chairman, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying “If our emergency rooms are stretched thin now, how will they provide medical care in the event of a disaster? Our emergency care safety net is at risk. We must identify ways to reduce overcrowding and improve coordination.”

Emergency rooms see too many patients who don’t actually have emergency conditions. “Boarding,” or the overcrowding of ERs for lack of general care beds, also contributes to the problem, as a report from the Institute of Medicine highlighted a few months ago. Now a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finds that between 40 and 50 percent of emergency departments experienced crowding during 2003 and 2004. These problems are compounded by a decreasing number of hospitals operating round-the-clock ERs and a shortage of nurses.

September 28, 2006 Related topics: Quality, Safety, Errors