09-23-2014, 08:20 AM
Seniors-on-stretchers: a health care disgrace
Quote:The commissioner makes the point that waits in the ER are not the fault of the ER. The endless bottlenecks are due to problems upstream and downstream. In other words, it’s an engineering issue, not a medical one.
The commissioner estimates that 60 per cent of patients who go to the emergency room should not be there at all...
The real worrisome situation is that of the non-ambulatory patients stuck in ER purgatory.
Some of the gurney-bound are waiting for a hospital bed, but only about one-third are admitted to hospital. Beds are in short supply because there are many frail seniors already stuck living in hospital with nowhere to go for lack of home care or long-term care beds.
The majority of elderly ER patients have the same dilemma: They’re not sick enough to be hospitalized, but too sick to go home alone, or back to a nursing home where there is no medical care.
It’s a perverse scenario that plays out daily and with increasing frequency.
But we know the solution.
We don’t need bigger ERs. We need to shift resources from hospitals into primary care for the ambulatory and home care and community care for the non-ambulatory.