The impending storm: COVID-19, pandemics and our overwhelmed emergency departments

Previously, I have written about the national crisis in emergency care [1]. As many of us know, emergency departments (EDs) are being overwhelmed by untenable patient volumes and care requirements. As my prior article titled “A Brewing Storm: Our Overwhelmed Emergency Departments” noted, this problem has been well known for many years and, yet, generally ignored by the lay press and public [1]. In 2006, fourteen years ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) warned of this in a report titled “Hospital-Based Emergency Care: At the Breaking Point.” In that report, the IOM noted that EDs were already overwhelmed and that our patient visits per year were significantly increasing [2].

Source: The American Journal of Emergency Medicine - March 22, 2020 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Darren P. Mareiniss Source Type: research