They’re facing an emergency of their own:
An increasing number of Palm Beach County doctors, including many who no longer have malpractice insurance coverage, are refusing to work in the emergency room or reducing the days they are willing to work there because they fear the added liability risk.
The problem has led to delays in treatment and required some emergency patients to be transferred to — or “dumped” on — hospitals in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and as far away as Gainesville.
(Phil Galewitz, “Cures sought for ER doctor shortages”, Palm Beach Post, Dec. 11)(via KevinMD).
Also from KevinMD regarding emergency rooms, here’s some advice from a plaintiff’s lawyer on how to behave if you’re a patient using an ER. It does not go over well with Kevin’s readers.
3 Comments
Unbelievable. I thought you needed an MD, not a JD, to practice medicine.
Nothing speaks greater volumes than actual action. In any profession people will move to the money. When income dwindles (through lower pay and/or higher costs) people will tollerate it to some extent because of the large up front cost associated with a job switch.
So when people really do make a career change it is because the income has fallen significantly below other options with little hope of rebound in site.
These actual shortages of physicians are the tail end of a process that has been happening for a while. The nail in the coffin will be when medical students elect not to train in certain fields. Once a physician doesn’t train in one of these areas, they are lost to that specialty forever.
The field of anesthesiology is in exactly this problem due to poor forcasting of an oversupply. Students who did not train in anesthesia during the 90’s have left a large gap in the workforce that cannot be replaced for a generation.
All of this is just skirting the real issue, which is that a large segment of the American population uses the ER inappropriately (for pregnancy tests, mosquito bites, a cough & sniffle, that ache I’ve had for the last 6 months but never bothered about until tonight). And why is it that these people always show up at 11pm or later? There’s nothing on TV, so let’s go to the ER! Call ’em trolls, gomers (Get Out of My ER), or “citizens,” they’re the sludge in an ER’s engine.
Thanks to EMTALA, anyone who presents to the ER must be given a medical screening exam. Some courts have extended that obligation to the hospital parking lot, too.
Result? People on Medicare use the ER as a clinic, and some people without insurance just give fake names & addresses. It doesn’t matter because they know they have to be seen, and can sue if they’re not seen. Abuse of the system is rampant, and taxpayers foot the bill.
And lawyers like Dickie Scruggs have sued hospitals for trying to collect on those bills.
So, with healthcare viewed as a quasi-fundamental “right,” the practice of emergency medicine has a strong element of involuntary servitude to it. I have just as much of a “right” to eat, but does that mean restaurants have to serve me for free? Gee, I think I have a right to a new car, too!
If patients with non-emergent conditions could be shuffled out of the ER, that would solve much of the problem. Would that really be “dumping?”