SEH-artsen hopen gehoord te worden in het debat rond het hervormingen in de zorg

Mitka M. Emergency Physicians Hope to Be Heard in Debate Over Health System Reform. JAMA. 2009;302(4):371-373

A new government report that once again highlights the overcrowding typically experienced in US emergency departments may help draw the attention of Congress and the President as they debate ways to reform health care delivery.
The report, by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), notes that overcrowding continues to be an issue that results in delays to patients who need urgent care (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09347.pdf). In 2006 (the most recent year studied), the average wait for a patient with a dire emergency to see a physician exceeded recommended time frames. Patients classified as requiring immediate care (to be seen in less than 1 minute) waited an average of 28 minutes while those classified as emergent (to be seen within 1-14 minutes) waited an average of 37 minutes.

The GAO went on to say that almost 74% of patients who were classified as requiring immediate care and just over 50% of patients requiring emergent care had waits that exceeded the recommended time frames. These classifications are based on the 5-level emergency severity index of the National Center for Health Statistics recommended by the Emergency Nurses Association.
Nicholas J. Jouriles, MD, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, in commenting on the GAO report said, "The information in there is not surprising to the nation's emergency physicians, but this is now the government officially saying this is a problem."
The report was prepared at the request of Sen Max Baucus (D, Mont), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Baucus, a key player in the debate over health system reform, said in a statement that the emergency department overcrowding described in the report was "unacceptable." He went on to say, "But emergency room overcrowding is only one symptom. The entire health care system is sick." Baucus had requested a similar report from the GAO (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03460.pdf) in 2003 when he was the ranking minority member of the Finance Committee.
James G. Adams, MD, professor and chair of the department of emergency medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago hopes the link Baucus made between emergency department overcrowding and health care reform holds.
"The only good way to decrease crowding is to minimize inflow [of patients] and improve throughput and outflow," Adams said. "To minimize inflow, we can be in synch with health care reform efforts to optimize cost and quality, with incentives to work across the continuum of care from the emergency department, hospital, specialist, and outpatient doctor, as one big team to share information, add value, avoid duplication and redundancy, and coordinate better."

Lees hier het volledige artikel

• Print
• Stuur door
• Delicious