Since SEIU began its Healthcare United campaign last February, the state of emergency room care has become a reoccurring topic on this site. It’s not especially by design, but nonetheless, it’s happened because the nurses, doctors and caregivers that make up the Healthcare United community consistently bring it up as an issue.A new study has just made its way to our desk, illustrating just how broad these concerns are. We’re not especially surprised with the findings - after all, we read and react to what all of you send in. Still, we can’t help but become overwhelmed by these numbers.
This particular study, funded by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and published by the Annals of Emergency Medicine, sought to measure how truly widespread the problems that face our emergency rooms are. While there have been plenty of studies around the emergency room, this study is particularly interesting because it seeks to measure the opinions of caregivers like you.
A total of 3,562 emergency medicine staffers were surveyed in 65 hospitals, asking for their perspective on the state of ER care. Researches sought to measure opinion in four different categories: physical environment, staffing, inpatient coordination, and “information coordination and consultation.”
Overall, here’s how the responses broke down:
- A majority of ER caregivers - 65% - thought that there was insufficient space for delivery of care either some or most of the time.
- A very clear majority - 82% - felt that “the number of patients exceeded ED capacity to provide safe care most or some of the time.”
- Only 41% of ER caregivers “indicated that most of the time specialty consultation for critically ill patients arrived within 30 minutes of being contacted.”
- Approximately half of respondents “reported that ED patients requiring admission to the ICU were rarely transferred from the ED to the ICU within 1 hour.”
