Ineffective ER’s
KC Star – Our emergency rooms are not evolving.
American emergency rooms are stretched to the breaking point and are “ill-prepared to handle large-scale emergencies,” the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine reported Wednesday.
“You’ve got to ask yourself: If our 911 services are struggling to handle our daily and nightly 911 calls, how in the world are they going to handle a mass-casualty event, a terrorist strike, an outbreak of infectious disease or a natural disaster?” asked Arthur Kellermann, chairman of emergency medicine at Emory University.
As they list some of the factors contributing to this fiasco we can see some core faults – namely too much overhead stemming from too much bureaucracy –
The problems, it said, grow out of the need for emergency rooms to provide routine care for millions of uninsured patients, a shortage of nurses and medical specialists, and failure to use modern methods to manage the flow of patients.
Coming from a very half-full perspective there’s a major market here. From the half-empty perspective: we really are on our own. I’ve been doing some thinking on individual/primary resiliency, will be posting some of that soon.
-Shlok
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