CampusRN Job Blog
Starting Health Care Reform in the ER
Friday, June 19, 2009
To get a sense of just how dysfunctional American health care is, members of Congress don’t need to look further than their local emergency department (ED). The overcrowding in EDs is so bad these days that patients who walk in with “immediate” needs, meaning the most severe on a clinical scale, wait an average of 28 minutes to see a doctor, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in May. That’s 27 minutes more than the recommended wait time for such conditions. Between 1996 and 2006, even as some 200 EDs shut down completely, visits nationwide went from 90 million to 119 million, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Emergency departments are so packed that an ambulance is turned away and sent to one farther away every minute.
posted in: Massachusetts, news
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