Good news and bad news on the health front.
Emergency rooms confront a crisis of patient arrivals
Our emergency care system is overcrowded and overwhelmed concludes a 2 year study by the Institute of Medicine.
There are 114 million emergency room visits a year
A half-million times a year, or about once every minute, ambulances carrying sick patients are turned away from full emergency rooms and sent to others farther away.
No one knows how many people died as a result. We do know that emergency rooms are not ready to handle mass casualties from a pandemic of bird flu or a terrorist attack.
``If you can barely get through the night's 911 calls, how on earth can you handle a disaster?" asked a coauthor of the report, Dr. Arthur Kellerman, Emory University's emergency medicine chief.
While Checklists to improve patient care may have saved thousands says Harvard doctor
More than 3,000 hospitals joined the project, including 61 in Massachusetts. Yesterday, Berwick said the campaign had created a new standard of care, and, by his organization's calculations, had saved more lives than predicted.
Posted by Jill Fallon at June 15, 2006 12:52 PM | Permalink