Survey Warns of Emergency Care Crisis

The nation’s leading specialists in emergency medicine Wednesday issued a report saying that overcrowding in hospital emergency rooms could “threaten the future of the country’s hospital system.”

The American College of Emergency Physicians said its first comprehensive survey of emergency rooms nationwide found that hospital emergency departments in 41 states, including California, are so seriously overcrowded that the welfare of patients is threatened.

For millions of inner-city residents, particularly those without health insurance or regular medical care, emergency rooms have replaced the family doctor in the past few decades.

According to statistics collected by the American Hospital Assn., emergency rooms will handle almost 90 million visits this year; five years ago, the total was 80 million.

The report cited many complicated reasons for the emerging crisis, and officials said that without large infusions of public funds, solutions will be difficult to find. The crunch is due at least partly to “cutbacks in health-care services during a period of increasing demand,” the report said.

It also cited increased numbers of drug-related emergency room admissions and cases of AIDS, rising numbers of poor people and others without medical insurance, a severe shortage of nurses at inner-city hospitals and a formula by which hospitals are paid less for cases handled in the emergency room than others.

The ACEP survey found that the problem is much more extensive than most officials had previously realized.