Increase In Emergency Department Visits For Non-urgent Cases

         Despite presence of well-trained professional physicians in the community, there has been a surging soar in the number of patients visiting the Emergency Department in recent times. The mission of an ED is to provide trauma and emergency services for patients in imminent danger of losing their life or suffering permanent damage to their health. Most visits are however not so urgent. Nursing care and patients’ outcome therefore greatly affected, and doctors and nurses are often overworked while operating in an environment of complex and confusing overregulation. Moreover, quality care for patients is greatly hampered. Shifting ED use for non-urgent cases to the primary doctor and increasing doctors’ payment are some of the solutions to this looming menace.

          Various reasons contribute to increased non-emergent visits to Emergency Departments some of which are: Lack of knowledge of what ‘emergency’ entails by the patients. In his report in an hearing on ”Diverting Non-urgent Emergency Room Use:  Can It Provide Better Care and Lower Costs?”, (May 11, 2011 ) tabled before the American senate, Peter Cunningham noted that the urgency of a visit “includes five categories: (1) Immediate (patient needs to be seen immediately; (2) emergent (needs to be seen within 15 minutes upon arrival); (3) urgent (between 15-60 minutes); (4) semi-urgent (1-2 hours) and non-urgent (2-24 hours)”. Most patients however do not understand this. An example often used to highlight the difficulty is a patient arriving at an emergency department complaining of chest pains and concerns of a possible heart attack, only to learn after a medical examination, the problem is severe indigestion. This might not be emergent according to a physician’s diagnosis. Another probable reason is erosion in access to office-based doctors. This is more to the service and attitude of the doctors to the patients- Some physicians believe they are no longer able to afford to provide charity care because of financial pressures from payers, while others have much less time for charitable and volunteer activities because of the increased demand for care by privately insured patients.