|
E-mail this page to a friend!
Features for Senior Citizens
Senior Citizens Should be Concerned with Failure of
Emergency Rooms
Study finds 22,000 preventable deaths occur across
the nations emergency departments
 Nov. 05, 2007 - Emergency departments across the
nation are failing to meet national goals in treating many heart attack
and pneumonia patients, according to a study by Johns Hopkins
researchers published in the October issue of Academic Emergency
Medicine. Millions of senior citizens, more than any other age group,
depend on EDs for life-saving performance.
| |
Related Stories |
|
| |
Senior Citizens Fear Nursing Home, Loss of
Independence More than Death
Baby boomers fear aging parents will be mistreated
in nursing homes
Oct. 25, 2007
Faced with Death, Our Minds Search for Happier
Thoughts
Brain allows us to think about dying without being
paralyzed by fear
Oct. 22, 2007
Senior Citizens at Highest Risk of Dying from
Suicide and About Anything Else, Actually
Suicide ranks much higher as cause of death for
younger people
By Tucker Sutherland, editor
Sept. 19, 2007
Senior Citizen Health & Medicine
Race, Gender, Insurance Bias Found in Emergency Care
for Chest Pain
African American men were 25-30% less likely to
receive needed tests
February 4, 2007
Read more
Features for Senior Citizens |
|
In a survey that also found care levels dependent
on race, geography and type of health insurance, the investigators
studied records of 1,492 heart attack patients and 3,955 pneumonia
patients seen at 544 emergency departments between 1998 and 2004 .
Results showed only 40 percent ED compliance with
recommended aspirin therapy and 17 percent with recommended beta blocker
treatment of heart attack patients.
Only 69 percent of patients with pneumonia got
recommended antibiotics, and fewer than half (46 percent) had blood
oxygen levels assessed as recommended by the American Thoracic
Society.
The Joint Commission regulating hospitals and the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services say all eligible heart attack
and pneumonia patients presenting to EDs should receive aspirin/beta
blocker therapy, or antibiotic and oxygen assessment, respectively.
If these numbers are applied nationwide, we
estimate that as many as 22,000 deaths a year could be prevented in the
U.S. if ED caregivers followed practice standards, said Julius Pham,
M.D., principal investigator for the study and assistant professor of
medicine in the Johns Hopkins departments of Emergency Medicine and
Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine.
More resources should be directed at studying why
this is happening and developing strategies to ensure that 100 percent
of patients get the recommended treatments.
Also troubling, the Johns Hopkins researchers say,
are racial, geographic and financial differences in access to
recommended care.
Whites were 40 percent more likely to receive
aspirin therapy than non-whites, while people going to EDs in the
Northeast were 40 percent more likely to receive aspirin than similar
patients in the West.
Patients with private insurance were consistently
more likely to receive appropriate treatment, while patients seen in
government hospitals, either state or county, were consistently less
likely to get the optimum care.
These data suggest that the burden of
inappropriate care is borne more by minorities and the poor than by
others, says Pham. They also suggest that we still have much work to
do to ensure that everyone receives equitable care.
Our findings lend support to the need for
meaningful measures of ED performance, such as length of stay and return
to ED within 72 hours, and for monitoring to assure improvement, Pham
says.
Other members of the Hopkins research team were
Gabor Kelen, M.D., director of the Johns Hopkins Department of Emergency
Medicine, and Peter Pronovost, M.D., assistant professor of
anesthesiology and critical care medicine and medical director of
Hopkins Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care.
Click to More Senior News on the
Front Page
Copyright: SeniorJournal.com |
