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The title should be changed. This has nothing to do with ER capacity (or the pandemic, for those commenters already leaping to that conclusion), and the author admits 3/4ths of the way down the article that ER capacity is not the problem:
> The primary problem is not the number of patients coming to the ER. It’s the lack of open beds upstairs.
She goes on to explain that most of the problem is that hospitals keep their beds full so as to maximize profits, with a variety of reasons ranging from nursing home shortages to hospitals' tendency to prioritize elective surgeries (these make more money).
In fact, this entire article is very bad. The author asserts a problem, but provides no actual data to support the assertion, other than linking to some tweets of other people's opinions (edit: I shouldn't have said tweets; these are mostly links to pop journalism and editorials). Here's a paper quantifying the boarding problem in hospitals in the US, during the worst part of the pandemic:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9526134/
to wit:
> Occupancy rates and boarding time had a threshold association: when occupancy exceeded 85%, boarding exceeded The Joint Commission 4-hour standard for 88.9% of hospital-months (Figure 1). In those hospital-months, median ED boarding time was 6.58 hours compared with 2.42 hours in other hospital-months (P < .001). Across all hospitals, the median ED boarding time was 2.00 hours (5th-95th percentile, 0.93-7.88 hours) in January 2020, 1.58 hours (5th-95th percentile, 0.90-3.51 hours) in April 2020, and 3.42 hours in December 2021 (5th-95th percentile, 1.27-9.14 hours).
As a paramedic in a major metro area...
The ED in the larger hospital near me where we take most of our patients (a Level 2 Trauma Center which, for the benefit of simplification is essentially a Level 1, without teaching facilities attached) about 8 years ago (say 2-3 before COVID) had 4 "pods", A-D, A and B on one side, registration, waiting, intake, in the middle, and C and D on the other (they formed something of a horseshoe around the intake area). Each pod had 10 rooms (they don't have ward style multiple patients to a room).
It used to be that C and D pods were "peak hours only", and after 3 or 4pm, there were no patients, and the lights were down.
Then things changed. C and D pods run 24/7 now.
And there are 24 "hallway beds" which are typically lower acuity patients literally on gurneys in the halls, one in front of each room.
Then the psych holding area (5 secured rooms) started overflowing.
Patients are now given gowns and scrubs based on their needs. A shocking number of the hallway beds are brown scrubs, which indicates mental health, often with a hold in place (i.e. they are not "free to leave", until evaluation and treatment plan has been determined, as a threat to themselves or others).
Oftentimes this means finding an inpatient bed elsewhere.
I have, tragically, watched frequent fliers with severe mental illness wait multiple days on a hallway bed. Nothing to read, watch, look at. No rest. No pause from the chaos. At least in a room, you can have a curtain drawn, lights dimmed. Not in the hallway. 24/7 we're wheeling patients by you as EMS, conversations at nursing stations. For me, perfectly "sane", that would drive me to the brink, to someone already in crisis ... The only "solution" that is compatible with that environment is sedation. (To be clear, it is not a solution, just the only one compatible then and there).
> hospitals' tendency to prioritize elective surgeries (these make more money).
At least this hospital, and a couple of others I know in the near region, hospitals have expanded their outpatient surgery and elective surgery, already in its own building, to include inpatient, too, so those patients are not taking up room for admissions out of the ED.
I believe you, and it's telling that this wasn't part of the OP's post. There are lots of reasons that ERs are seeing increasing load, and some of them support a left-wing argument, and others support a right-wing argument.
The person doing the arguing will pick and choose their examples to fit their preferred narratives.
Yes, the boarding phenomenon is a well-reported byproduct of closure of public inpatient mental health facilities, which in recent years met a surge of mental health crises. Mental health patients are really the only group ill enough to be admitted but which the system will not allocate resources to serve. See:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6754202/
https://www.jointcommission.org/-/media/tjc/newsletters/quic...
> The author asserts a problem, but provides no actual data to support the assertion, other than linking to some tweets of other people's opinions.
Here's the hosts linked to by the article:
Object.entries(Object.groupBy(Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".body a")).map(a => a.href.split("/")[2]), x => x)).map(([host, refs]) => [host, refs.length])
[ "www.acep.org", 4 ]
[ "substackcdn.com", 3 ]
[ "link.springer.com", 2 ]
[ "onlinelibrary.wiley.com", 1 ]
[ "papers.ssrn.com", 1 ]
[ "catalyst.nejm.org", 3 ]
[ "www.washingtonpost.com", 1 ]
[ "mmshub.cms.gov", 2 ]
[ "yalesurvey.ca1.qualtrics.com", 2 ]
[ "youcanknowthings.com", 1 ]
Domains mean nothing. Click on the very first link (ACEP; anchor text "sounding the alarm"), and you'll see that it's a news article (actually, an editorial) with no cited authors that I can find. It leads with this completely un-sourced assertion:
> Wait times and staffing shortages are worse today than at any point during the pandemic in many communities. The resulting bottlenecks are overwhelming hospitals, causing dangerous delays, and putting lives at risk. Emergency care teams are strained to their limits. Demand for emergency care and services shows no signs of slowing as we head straight toward this winter’s “triple threat” of flu, COVID-19, and pediatric respiratory illnesses like RSV that are filling emergency departments. The influx of patients only piles more stress onto the shoulders of emergency physicians, who are doing all they can to treat anyone who needs them.
Aside from leaning heavily on emotional wording ("strained to their limits", "doing all they can"), these kinds of claims are meaningless without data. The rest of the piece is no better -- it's just anecdote after anecdote, written in newspaper style.
The second link is a poll of patients. That's data of some kind, I suppose, but it's not what you'd use to support the claim. That's the entirety of the evidence advanced to prove the fundamental claim that emergency rooms are "overwhelmed".
Point being: I looked at the links before I wrote what I wrote. The "evidence" being used here is mostly opinions, surveys and editorials. It's a classic example of "evidence laundering", wherein someone links to pop articles on reputable-sounding domains to make bald assertions sound like rigorous research.
I said "tweets" because I thought I saw a link to X in there, but I think I was wrong about that. Mea culpa.
New hospitals are being built with fewer beds than the ones they are replacing.
The current objective in hospital medicine is to get the patient home as soon as possible. There's a lot of good reasons for that, hosiptals are disease cesspools. Basically if you don't need intensive care they want to send you home.
> New hospitals are being built with fewer beds than the ones they are replacing.
Guess why?
Because new hospitals need a Certificate of Need to be approved for construction.
What's that? It's a process by which -other hospitals in the area- get to say whether a new facility should be built. In many cases, this means a fine tuning of things to make sure you maintain available beds across all hospitals just short of the actual need (because if your facility is going to absorb the need, and leave others with empty beds, then you ain't getting your certificate).
This process was lobbied for by the hospitals themselves.
I don't know about the former part, but I agree with the latter completely. Turning people quickly from hospitals is a good thing. The longer you stay in a hospital, the more likely you are to die from something bad that happened to you in the hospital.
But, it doesn't have anything directly to do with the so-called "boarding problem", which is what this article is about. That's mostly about the for-profit nature of our health care system, which is doing exactly what one would expect (optimizing profits).
There are even programs these days where people are sent home while still technically being admitted to a hospital, with a nurse coming by on a regular basis to administer medications, change dressings, provide other needed care, etc. Doctors are involved via teleconference when needed.
It's also that so many people who go to the ER don't really have an emergency. Sometimes these are people who just don't want until the next day (or week) to see their regular doctor. Sometimes they are people who have nowhere else to go, and they know the ER can't turn them away.
I avoid the ER unless I think I am putting my life at risk by not going. I cut my finger open earlier this year, it probably could have used stitches but I was not going to subject myself to the ER experience for that. I taped it up, kept it clean, and it healed. There's a scar, but I'm not a hand model.
That's where urgent cares come in. I did the same thing to my finger and they stitched it up no problem. They even took X-rays with a remote doctor checking the imagines. 50$ in and out. No clogging up emergency rooms.
It was a Sunday, as tends to be the case with these things, urgent care not open. I could have gone to the ER and spent the rest of the day there in a queue for service, or wait and go to urgent care on Monday, but if you wait that long they won't stitch up a cut anyway. I didn't have any loss of feeling or movement so I decided to just clean it out, bandage it up and let it heal.
In many places (different countries), the appointments are further and further into the future, so I do not blame them. ER does triage too.
Most ERs have a fast track area dedicated to this kind of thing.
Time is money
Wellbeing improves productivity
It is unprofitable to provide "perfect service", because in order to provide perfect service you need people on hand that aren't doing anything that can spring into action during surge events.
Someone's going to stand around when there's an imbalance between demand and labor supply. At our local grocery store, they overhire high school kids to stand around waiting to check people out. I've never waited in line for more than 3 minutes there. If they cut costs by firing the extra labor, I'd have to stand around and wait for the "optimized" labor force to attend to me.
It's not polite yo say so, but perhaps it's worth considering that a for-profit Healthcare system is not necessarily aligned with a "optimal outcomes" system.
In other words you can have a system which prioritizes profit, or you can have a system that prioritizes care. But you can't prioritize both.
Our hospitals are not for-profit here in Canada, but they still have clusterfucked emergency rooms. (In some places, probably worse.)
There's always some kind of rationing of the limited resource. There it's based in large part on you or your insurance's ability to pay. Here it's based on how much the government/taxpayer is willing to shell out.
These hospitals are actually subject to regulation, though, and the regulation does not actually condition funding on spare capacity. That's just going to lead to broken results. A completely publicly funded healthcare system without spare capacity requirements would falter in the same way.
The core philosophical truth of healthcare is you can never have a system that prioritizes care above all. Such is economically intractable. Imagine millions of immortals with artificial heart/lungs (called ECMO, exists for a long time), artificial kidneys (dailysis), etc, costing LOTS Of econonmic resources per day, living for years. The truth of this transcends government. A communist or socialist government still must confront resource allocation.
What we need is something that looks at that efficiency-care-quality tradeoff curve and finds something like the markowitz efficient frontier. Now.. that hospitals operate at such efficiency ought to be a consequent of capitalistic competition even in a for-profit context. The american health system is so crooked and bureaucratic and overpriced, perhaps the most we can do is demand our hospitals be non-profits. Many "non-profit" hospitals seemingly have megabooms in growth, which makes me wonder where the money is coming from to fund the growth, if not profit.
> It's not polite yo say so, but perhaps it's worth considering that a for-profit Healthcare system is not necessarily aligned with a "optimal outcomes" system.
Polite? I cannot day
Obviously true, but
Is it so unprofitable to provide perfect service? Consider your grocery store example...
The incentives of hospitals are much more complex than those of grocery stores, because of how different their business is. One of their major customers, for all patients, is the government -- which rewards some things and not others. Unlike the grocery store, then, the hospitals have to be quite attentive not only to the experience of people coming the door but the metagame of quality measures -- what the government thinks the experience of those people is. The article hints at a reasonable solution, which is for the government to include surplus capacity as part of their incentive structure.
The basic problem is that demand is unpredictable.
From a patient care perspective you overprovision so that pretty much any surge doesn't exceed capacity. But note that the cost to the hospital is pretty much based on what they provision for, not what they actually do. You're not paying the hospital the big bucks for actually doing, you're paying for the capacity to do it.
From a profit perspective you overprovision only to the point where the marginal value drops to zero, a point far below the peak of a surge. Unless mandated otherwise no business provisions to the biggest surges.
I have walked out of stores when the wait time is too long. If it didn’t hurt sales what would stop an entire Home Depot from operating off of only one employee?
I am really hoping more people will be aware of the time they’re wasting and at least understand there’s a reason things are slow. Understaffing is a deliberate choice, and time is an extra tax that people apparently don’t consider. If you price your time at zero, the store will too.
John Oliver (I know, entertainment, but still) did a segment on this, although around the low end stores, like Dollar General. And they do exactly this. "Ever wonder why it's chaotic? Because many a time DG will literally schedule only two, or even one, employee to the shift. And they're on the register, so shelf stocking, cleaning is not on their agenda."
I’m surprised to see no mention of Certificates of Need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need. In most of the US hospitals need to have a license for their number of beds, the idea being that regulators don’t want there to be too many beds because hospitals tend to find ways to fill them unnecessarily. I’m not familiar with the literature about how good of an argument that is. Intuitively you can see how that could be an impediment when there is a greater need for hospital beds.
Please do also remember that law dates to a time when everybody was on indemnity health plans covered mostly by the mills and manufacturing plants.
That's the idea. In reality other hospitals in the area get to have a significant say in new facilities to ensure that they are not either operating empty beds (non-maximal revenue) or filling them with delayed discharges.
Remember that hospitals and hospital owners lobbied the Nixon administration heavily to get this process put into law, and it becomes a bit clearer.
Hospitals need to be BIG. Basic logic does something like “population * sickness-rate = mean required beds for hospital budget”, but this is logical for lossy services, not mandatory ones.
Not to get political, but when a service goes from being a luxury to being considered a human right, our tolerance for failure changes immediately. Anyone who works in reliability knows that the budget for “will never fail” is exponentially higher than “almost never fails”.
As we transmute more services to “fundamental right”, we need to expect costs to grow non-linearly, regardless of who is paying. None of this is a bad thing, we just need to be building freakin’ massive hospital buildings!
I don't see how healthcare can be considered a "fundamental right", like freedom to practice religion or ability to own property, because it relies on (and therefore places a burden on them) to deliver that service. If healthcare is my fundamental right, how can you, who is providing care, take a day off or quit the job entirely? Am I entitled to every possible test as frequently as possible plus every potential drug or medicine even as my prospects for regaining health diminish towards zero? Government's should have some system for providing "pretty good" healthcare to the largest percentage of its citizens as possible, but raising it to a "fundamental right" is not sustainable or possible or fair.
The same could be said of food, water, and safe shelter.
The concept of a fundamental right here depends on a morality that says everyone has a right to live, and that society should help make that possible, probably partially through taxes.
If your morality is different, your opinion of whether the above are fundamental rights, might also be different.
I personally agree with both points: I believe "pretty good healthcare" is a fundamental right. That is to say, it should be limited only by factors humans can't control (e.g the lead time for training new people), and otherwise be "best effort" given that constraint.
What else then in modern society would not be consider "fundamental right"? Security and safety? No more state provided police or court services... No regulations? Modern state goes quite far on things and I see no reason why basic health care should not be part of those services.
There's a point where the vertical integration of services doesn't scale up with demand - and you get what is happening here, which is effectively kanban, a pull based model for patient flow.
The scale out cost for hospitals are in the order of billions and decades to become available.
The US needs significantly more diversionary, urgent care resources - a cut or fracture below a certain threshold does not need to be in the same emergency room as a stab victim or crush victim.
Going back further, preventative care absolutely needs to be in place so chronic illnesses do not progress to the point of emergency.
The Australian model is simple enough: for medications, for the most common treatments, these are on a pharmaceuticals benefits list. The government guarantees the price is kept low, even if the manufacturer is charging ridiculous amounts. This works, because paying $600 extra a month for someone's pills from taxes saves $1200+ of them not rocking up to hospital on death's door 12 times a year.
How is discouraging people who don't actually need an ER from showing up at an ER a bad idea? If I have something urgent but not an emergency, I could either do ER or Urgent Care. If I'm pretty confident Urgent Care can handle it, it might make more sense to do 1-2h to go to an urgent care option vs. 10 minutes to ER and 4h wait (for care which exposes me to lots of other risks).
There are a bunch of things where I'd rather wait 8-24h at home, even in pain, than go to an overloaded emergency room.
This article is not about that at all. It's about patients that need to be admitted (ie they DO need hospital treatment) being stuck in ERs because the hospital has no beds.
You have s home snd a nice one most likely. The typical ER "frequent flyer" does not. Many are unhoused or members of the renter class, or living with parents/caregivers/etc...
I think it would he interesting to compare teal estate prices and rent with ER overcrowding. My guess is few of the surplus patients own nice homes.
In my experience, urgent care charges extremely high and unpredictable prices. However, I agree with you that there should be some way for people to get routine things addressed quickly without going to the ER.
> Prioritizing elective surgeries. Elective surgeries bring in more money, so sometimes hospitals prioritize beds for surgeries instead of sick patients waiting in the ER.
Why aren't there facilities out there that just specialize in the elective surgeries and don't have ERs and other things that are money-losers?
Seems like you could provide all the money-making services without the money-losing ones.
> Why aren't there facilities out there that just specialize in the elective surgeries
There definitely are. But I wonder if the main sticking point may be access to an ER in case something goes terribly wrong during surgery. I know that gets used as a bludgeon against abortion providers, but I imagine the same basic regulations apply to any clinic offering surgical services.
They will not fix this. Indeed, regulation is required, but meaningful change requires a functioning, coherent government with institutions that are not fully enclosed in regulatory capture.
The United States is falling apart, and it is no longer capable of solving its own problems. Now, inertia keeps legacy systems functioning, until fascism and/or balkanization a-la USSR takes over.
Survey is no longer available
> The emergency room (ER) is the front door of the hospital. Patients come and are quickly seen by a physician, who addresses medical emergencies and other needs.
There it is. The ER, even with its shortcomings, is a better user experience. You have a medical concern, and you get it addressed in a reasonable time— not the weeks or months you need to wait for your primary care or a specialist to be bothered to see you.
The worst part is teaching people that their experience might not reflect the quality of care. People want to eat fast food (immediate gratification) but not necessarily good for them in the long term, in particular if that's all the ear.
Similarly, seeing an EM physician for "what ails you" might check the "got seen in under 24 hours box," but I try to be very up front with my patients that "unless you have a heart attack, a stroke, a car accident, have cut off a body part, etc. you might be getting second or third-rate care from me." I usually try to phrase it as "I didn't get any training in non-emergency problems, and I think you deserve to see a doctor which the right expertise, so I think waiting for that scheduled appointment is worth it, even if it takes a while."
It is hard to help people understand that no matter how bad the alternative is, that doesn't make me any better at dealing with non-emergency conditions.
It’s safe to stop reading any article at the point they say something like this:
> Year 4 of a pandemic
Being in denial of the problem doesn't make it go away.
2023 provisional data puts Covid at #10 at 50k/yr and this is undoubtedly an undercount as patients that die of a deadly clot due to Covid are likely to not be counted as Covid deaths.
Ah, facts and accurate terminology are pesky. I wonder if the author of the article:
- Is a doctor - With a PhD ontop of the medical degree - Who works in an ER setting - and is able to specifically know and understand what the word pandemic means
... In the context of a blog post about ER throughput.
Let me just check for a second and, oh look at that: the author is all of those four points.
COVID infected huge numbers of people, and variants of it continue to reinfect. Long term problems exist in a significant number of people - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2
COVID has not magically vanished: https://www.idsociety.org/covid-19-real-time-learning-networ...
It is very much still a pandemic, if for some reason you do not believe that.
Otherwise I have to assume you are rejecting the entire article because you do agree it's still a pandemic, but for some reason can't picture why long term effects of COVID may have a relationship to hospital presentations and complexity of cases.