Since April, the emergency room has not had to close at all, thanks to a series of new measures initiated by the hospital.
In his 2007 book Sick, Jonathan Cohn documents countless cases of critically ill people being rushed to the nearest emergency room, only to be turned away because of overcrowding. The consequences were often fatal. In a “Code Red” (all beds full) situation, however, even stroke and heart attack victims can be turned away because they can’t compete with the throngs of people without insurance who show up in the ER for everything from people wanting to get a prescription filled to car crash victims with the most severe injuries.
The problem is especially severe at the Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz. In 2007, the ER was closed for 57 hours a month on average because of overcrowding. Dominican operates the only emergency room in the city.
Since April, however, the emergency room has not had to close at all, thanks to a series of new measures initiated by the hospital. The new policy begins with replacing the nurse receiving the patients with a physician who can conduct immediate triage to decide which cases demand the most urgent attention. In the past, patients were first seen by a nurse, who then sent them to a physician. The hospital also added a physician’s assistant and two emergency medical technicians, as well as a second CT scanning machine to detect internal bleeding and strokes.
The results so far have been outstanding. Nationwide, the average wait in an emergency room is 55 minutes, but this has been reduced to 40 minutes at Dominican—before the program it was 66 minutes. But all is not rosy. As the recession deepens, more people are losing their health insurance with their jobs, and the number of people turning to the emergency room for everything from public drunkenness to a fever is steadily on the rise. It still remains to be seen if Dominican Hospital, which has made such great strides, can keep up the excellent work. Read More at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
