Too Many Emergency Room Visits?
Here is the argument for keeping things just as they are:
Researchers reviewed the records from almost 35,000 patient visits to emergency departments across the country. In 6 percent of cases, the patient was discharged and could have been treated in a doctor’s office.
The researchers then combed through the initial symptoms or complaints of these non-urgent cases and discovered that in nearly 90 percent of the other, more urgent cases, patients came to the emergency room with the same primary presenting symptoms, complaints like abdominal discomfort, chest pain or fever. In addition, more than 10 percent of these urgent patients ended up requiring hospital admission, surgery or intensive care.
I’m skeptical. It looks to me like only 10% of the patients really needed hospital care.