Emergency rooms shouldn’t be used like family doctors
There’s a growing medical emergency in this country, but the culprit is not a new virus, though it may be found in the emergency rooms of hospitals. Nationally, the nation’s nearly 4,000 hospital emergency rooms are operating at critical capacity with ER patient visits up more than 16 percent between 1996 and 2001.
But that increase, large by any standard, is dwarfed by the huge spike in Tennessee ER visits, which are more than double the national rate.
Recent surveys by the American Hospital Association have found that 90 percent of large hospitals’ ERs were at or above capacity, and 60 percent of hospitals nationwide believed they were filled to capacity and could not easily accommodate additional patients.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were 108 million ER visits in 2000, representing a 14 percent jump from 95 million visits just three years before. But in Tennessee, ER visits were far more dramatic, up 31 percent or more than double the national rate of increase. And the increases show no sign of abating. Indeed, the trend may actually be accelerating.
The Tennessee Hospital Association reports that the state’s emergency rooms have seen a 35 percent increase in volume in the past three years, much of it from patients who are using the hospital ER system as their primary source of medical care.
The statistics tell the story: ER utilization by TennCare patients is up an alarming 49 percent since 2000. ER utilization by indigent and self-pay patients was the second fastest growing category of emergency room visits, growing 20 percent last year and 39 percent during the past three years.
TennCare patients, as well as the public generally, need to learn about the proper use of emergency rooms. Such ongoing communication is key to both empowering potential patients to make better health care choices for themselves and their families and also in keeping Tennessee’s hospital emergency rooms open and operating effectively.