You do realize that every emergency room has a disaster program and a contact chain. If there is an emergency, extra doctors will come in. Otherwise, they staff as needed. Hospitals have an incentive to decrease wait times and as noted, most of them publicize them so if you do not have a life-threatening emergency, you can go to the hospital with the shortest current wait time.
Alternatively, you can pay primary care doctors more and treat them better. (Warning-long rant).Today, for example, a patient came back from a urology consult for an enlarged prostate. The urologist sent him back with a note saying that he agreed with the medication that I had prescribed and instructed the patient to have me titrate it up as needed and to monitor for side effects and to have me monitor the PSA level. This would not be so bad except that the patient’s pulmonologist said essentially the same thing about his asthma medications, and his GI doctor recommended a CT scan but advised him to “get your primary MD to do the preauthorization”. Did I mention that for each of these visits the specialists (who barely addressed one problem each and in several cases did not even lay hands on the patient) were paid approximately 3x what I get for a visit (during which I actually had to examine the patient’s heart, lung, abdomen and prostate, had to assess all of his 10+ medications for interactions and side effects, had to also monitor his cholesterol and diabetes and had to have my office manager spend over an hour on the telephone preauthorizing the CT)? Not to mention having to deal with he patient complaining that the copay for each of these doctor visits was $40 and my copay was only $20 so why did he have to see them anyway since they weren’t doing anything that I wasn’t. You seriously have to be insane to go into primary care. You get no respect and not enough pay for current doctors to pay back their loans. To make any money you have to see a patient every 15 minutes which either means referring them to a specialist for chronic problems (see above) or taking the time needed with patients and running long waits, or booking longer appointments and creating long waits for patients who need to be seen urgently. I would never recommend anybody go into primary care and sending more students to medical school is just going to create more specialists and subspecialists.
They aren’t averages. The best I can tell is that they are bullshit made up numbers.
Click on the link for the longest wait times in NJ in the cite I gave above, and here is what you’ll find:
So the worst times in NJ are significantly below the average times he gave. Maybe those numbers are for the entire emergency room visit, and not for the wait to see the doctor. Who knows? But you are arguing against incorrect statistics.
That is problem too many doctors want to be specialists, set up family doctor’s office or work at clinic but hate working in ER. And if you been working in ER for 5 to 10 years they looking for ways to leave the ER ASAP.
Than you got major shortage of doctors. No doctors incentive to work in ER.
No those priority 3 and 4 cases like burns, cuts, dog bites, stitches, colds, walking and twisted my ankle and minor swollen feet so on. Used to be hour or two hours tops wait times before!!
When before we had too many doctors.
In 90’s I hardly waited in ER. Most of time only 5 to 10 people in ER.
I suggest you do some ride on with your FD and EMS. Thankfully we have had no bad tornadoes.
Most MVA calls the rescue truck is not needed (no jaws of life needed) the FD and EMS can deal with call load unless there is really bad snow storm. But just about every shooting they run code to the hospital. And in my city many times the police escort the EMS to the hospital (with hospital staff waiting for them and shut down the intersection where they are driving.
I’m sure EMS or EMT can give the proper priority code outs than arm char EMS or EMT dreaming in their head of call events or disasters running non code and 90% of shooting priority 3 or 4. When you never seen or work with any medical events.
In are city priority one is unconscious, dying or about die. And priority two urgent. And these are hospital priority codes not EMS priority code. But they do discuss over phone or radio to the hospital to tell them they are on the way to hospital so the doctor knows what is coming in.
Other thing that is very imported is the nurse ie you walk into hospital with swollen leg and bit of pain than hour or two it is really swollen and really in lot of pain. Well your in the ER if your condition is getting worse other nurse can put more urgency thus seeing doctor sooner. Other hospitals are really bad the nurse is over worked don’t see you as your are in the room away from the nursing station waiting.
So the nurse miss people in the ER that are getting worse. To solve this problem get more nurses!! Have the waiting room by the nursing station.
First of all-please ignore the rant above. Having a bad day.
Second, there is no shortage of ER doctors. It is one of the higher-paid specialties with one of the better qualities of life (no call, shift-work only, no management of chronic conditions). There is some burnout but there are still many people who want to go into ER medicine. That said, there are some areas with long waits, but that does not mean that this is a universal phenomenon. It seems the OP may live in an area that is relatively underserved with emergency departments. Personally, I have been to the ER only once that I can remember in my entire life. It was about a year ago for a cut on my leg that I knew would need stitches and at 7:00 on a Sunday all of the local urgent cares were closed. I was seen immediately at their “fast track” (which most of the ER’s here have-usually staffed with nurse practitioners for non-lifethreatening cases) and got my sutures and tetanus shot and was on my way in less than an hour (although blood dripping on the waiting room floor does help them to see you faster).
I am not sure what you are saying. Are you saying that the US emergency rooms are better than those with universal health care? What country are you in?
The majority of the OP’s threads follow this pattern. Lots of unsupported claims about current problems and how things should be. He needs to provide some data to back up his premise before it’s worth engaging him on the details.
I live in tornado alley. I’ve had two go over the house I lived in, in the past. A few years ago we had a near miss (other people’s stuff falling on our house with devastation two blocks away).
It’s not that tornadoes can’t kill people, but for the amount of destruction they do there are remarkably low levels of injuries and deaths. Partly, it’s because of ample warning systems and people knowing they need to seek cover. Partly, it’s because the actual amount of time a tornado is over one spot is very brief - you only need to survive flying debris for a minute or two.
Tornadoes vary considerably in intensity as well - some EF0’s never get beyond the local news. The really big monsters are rare.
Uh… I can’t recall being in an ER where the waiting room wasn’t by the nursing station. Where the heck do you live?
Also - we could get more nurses back into the profession by offering higher wages and better working conditions, but for some reason we’d rather rant on message boards.
Assuming I’m deciphering this incoherent gabble correctly, you appear to be saying that in the UK and Canada one may have to wait 8-12 hours in A&E for non-urgent treatment and four hours for urgent treatment.
If so, this is about as accurate as your statement about US waiting times, which is to say it’s taking a minority of extreme cases and portraying it as the norm. At present about 6% of A&E cases in England take more than four hours from arrival to admission, treatment or discharge (stats here). This varies by which week, quarter or year you’re looking at and it certainly could be better, but it’s not the hell-on-earth you seem to think it is.
Well. There is a reason emergency rooms in the USA has such issues. For a large number of people emergency care through the emergency rooms is the only form of health care they can get.
Other countries have better access to healthcare for the whole population, and therefore do not sluice a large number of people whos conditions have gone critical through their emergency rooms.
18 % of GDP, 8800 per citizen per year. As opposed to other nations that average 9-10 % of GDP and about 4400 per person per year. Of course, other nations get healthcare for their entire populations for that. In fact, the 4 600 $ that is the governments share of US healthcare spending, and which covers 28 % of the population, is more per citizen than most other developed nations spend to provide universal health care.
A minor part of the reason for this, is the inherent inefficiency in allocating resources according to ability to pay rather than medical need. Something you see in US emergency room, with patients suffering from conditions that could have been adressed much cheaper and more effectivly at an earlier stage.
Interesting fact though: While the US 2.45 physicians per 1000 population may seem very low compared to other developed countries, it is actually worse than that. In the US it is so lucrative to specialize that there are a much lower proportion of GPs than in other countries.