
Patients Are Dying in Emergency Department Waiting Rooms: We call on HHS and CMS to help address the issue of ED boarding – Medpage Today
Emergency Department Crowding: The Canary in the Health Care System – NEJM
“ED crowding with its attendant patient safety risks remains a significant problem in many U.S. hospitals, particularly AMCs. The Covid-19 pandemic has intensified ED crowding due to necessary infection control processes alongside the pace of normalization of hospital operations, itself driven by the need to respond to pent-up demand for health care, delayed by the pandemic. ED crowding is predictably inevitable when inpatient census is sustained at unworkable levels. Hospital crowding itself is related to financial drivers that require very high inpatient census and financially incentivized preferential queuing of revenue-generating patients over admissions from the ED. Shortages in health system capacity in primary care, after-hours outpatient services, specialty referrals, and lack of post-acute care facilities, all contribute to hospital crowding…
“Like the ailing canary in the coal mine, ED crowding is a symptom of health care system dysfunction.”