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Terrifying
'Stat!' ER Overstuffing is Fatal
Many Docs Saw Death Of Patient
By
Melissa Klein
May 18, 2008
Overcrowding in the city's emergency rooms has become so acute that ambulances are steered elsewhere and patients warehoused for hours in what doctors say is a deadly wait for beds.
In a survey of 425 ER doctors in New York last year, 69 percent said they had personally experienced a patient suffering harm because there was no hospital bed available and the patient was held in the ER. And 28 percent said a patient died as a result.
The city's ERs were so full between January and March that most of them spent time on "diversion" - when hospitals ask ambulances to stay away because their ERs are so overcrowded. City ERs were on diversion a total of 5,600 hours - a 77 percent increase over the same period last year, a Post investigation found.
Even trauma centers such as Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan and Jacobi Medical Center in The Bronx could not handle more patients at certain times, according to FDNY statistics for the first three months of this year, a period when ERs are typically busiest.
Ambulance crews could still take critical patients to the closest emergency room, and the sick could continue to walk through the doors - but they found ERs with multiple gurneys stuffed into cubicles or lined in hallways as patients waited for rooms.
"It's not unheard of at all to have people waiting on a gurney for a day and a half," said Linda Green, a Columbia University Business School professor who has studied ER overcrowding.
Tom Hughes said his 85-year- old mother, a legally blind diabetic amputee, spent two days in the Maimonides Medical Center ER in Brooklyn waiting after she passed out at home in January.
"The ER was packed two and three deep in each room," he said. "It took a week before her primary physician was contacted."
Another patient said she spent a miserable 23 hours on a gurney there in February, her stomach aching because of internal bleeding, before she got fed up and went home.
Last month, a Maimonides patient said she got up to use the restroom and returned to find that her space in the treatment cubicle had been taken. She was relegated to the hallway.
The state Health Department is probing a complaint of poor treatment due to overcrowding at the Maimonides ER. The hospital logged 257 hours on diversion this winter, and it said it has opened up extra beds and more ER space to cope.
The situation is likely to get worse when three city hospitals close next month to comply with a state mandate to downsize the health-care system. Two in Manhattan have already shut their doors.
The day after St. Vincent's Midtown Hospital closed in September, ER traffic at nearby Roosevelt Hospital went up nearly 25 percent. Patients have to cope with the crowding while a renovation project to expand the ER is under way.
"You're practically touching the person on the stretcher next to you at busy times of the day," said Dr. Patricia Carey, the medical director for the Roosevelt ER.
Overcrowding also is tied to an increase in older and sicker patients, flu season, a dearth of hospital beds, especially in critical-care units, and increasing use of ERs for routine care.
Nationally, the group representing ER docs says patient visits have increased 20 percent from 1995 to 2005 while the number of emergency departments has declined.
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