First came COVID, this winter, plus the respiratory virus RSV and flu.
Emergency rooms across the country are full.
Emergency room overcrowding has been a health care problem for years, but now, health experts say it has reached crisis levels.
Imagine you rush into your local ER, wait not minutes, but hours, and then the ER doctor sends you to a hospital with no beds at all.
Arjun Venkatesh, Ph.D., emergency medicine at Yale University, and his colleagues documented widespread and growing overcrowding. In two newly published studies, researchers first looked at how long patients waited in emergency rooms before being admitted to the hospital.
“Those who come to the emergency room are evaluated, diagnosed and treated, and then need to be hospitalized. They need to stay in the hospital and wait 2, 3, 4, 12 and 24 hours for a bed in the hospital,” Yale University says Arjun Venkatesh, MD, an emergency room physician at the College of Medicine.
Wait times, or boarding times, are well above the national recommendation of a wait time of no more than four hours, the researchers said. As a result, Dr. Venkatesh said patients eventually leave.
“One in 10 people who come to the emergency room leave without treatment because they wait too long,” Dr. Venkatesh said.
Shortages of health care workers are leading to overcrowded hospitals — leading to longer emergency department wait times, researchers say. Dr. Venkatesh said hospitals may need to rethink the way they deliver care.
“We have to figure out how to get people who are trained and have the skills to go back to the bedside. Maybe, we start using artificial intelligence, computer technology and other tools that we have to do the background work so that those people can take care of patients and more effectively Do it,” explains Dr. Venkatesh.
