A study published today in Annals of Emergency Medicine show that patients who are admitted to crowded emergency departments are treated better than those admitted to deserted departments. To reach this conclusion, researchers at the University of Michigan (United States) studied the medical records of 17,500 patients admitted to some 3,000 US emergency departments. They monitored their state of health upon admission, two days after hospitalization and at the end of their stay. They concluded that a patient admitted to a saturated emergency department is more likely to survive, especially if he is suffering from an acute, potentially fatal illness.
High-risk patients
The reason for this, according to lead author Dr Keith Kocher, is that high-risk patients need highly skilled doctors and a hospital with cutting-edge technology to get the best care possible. And since the heaviest departments often rely on a well-equipped hospital, this explains why the risk of mortality is reduced by 10% in the most frequented emergency departments. This percentage even rises to 26% for patients with sepsis and 22% for patients with pulmonary insufficiency.
For the researchers at the University of Michigan, there are many diseases “at risk” which require skills in terms of diagnostic precision and in the follow-up of possible complications: pneumonia, congestive heart failure, sepsis, ‘acute myocardial infarction, stroke, respiratory failure and gastrointestinal bleeding. “For these diseases, the more patients doctors see, the better” insists Dr Kocher.
