Future of Emergency Care in the United States
Emergency physicians often encounter varied types of crisis in emergency care (EC). Chamberlain, Krug, & Shaw (2013), stipulates that overcrowded emergency departments (EDs), boarding of patients, diversions of ambulances, and the inability to identify specialists to take care of patients are some of the most common issues that are pushing the emergency care to the limits. As a result, the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) committee introduced different reports to examine the future of EC in the country. The committee’s concerns are mainly with the pre-hospital, hospital-based, and pediatric and trauma emergency care. The committee identified various issues in the emergency care system and made recommendations to improve the sector in the future. Improving the efficiency in the hospitals through enhanced patient flow could facilitate the elimination of bottlenecks, thus reducing crowding and consequent costs.
In the future, emergency care is intended to employ advanced tools and information technology to coordinate, communicate, and track the flow of operations. The committee has organized a regionalized system that has a single federal agency to manage the operations of emergency and trauma care (Sun et al. 2013). Regionalization of operations will facilitate the EDs, EMS, and the hospital to collaborate such that to communicate and coordinate various activities in a manner that ensures that patients get routed to the health care units using the appropriate resources.
There are plans to increase funding in the emergency care system in order to facilitate research into the most appropriate methods to use in the sector. Greater funding is intended to assist in disaster preparedness in emergency care. The congress is required to provide greater reimbursements to trauma centers and safety-net hospitals in order to make it easy for them to bear the right amount of cost to take care of all uninsured patients. According to Chamberlain, Krug, & Shaw (2013), efforts should be made for emphasis to enhance the quality of care on emergency pediatric patients. Although developing protocols and standards in disaster preparedness and prehistoric EMS are important, it is necessary to prioritize pediatric concerns. In addition, it is important to train emergency care workers in order to promote their comfort in treating pediatric patients. Taking these measures into concern will see to it that the emergency care in the US has systems of high quality that are reliable to all the patients.
References
Chamberlain, J. M., Krug, S., & Shaw, K. N. (2013). Emergency care for children in the United States. Health Affairs, 32(12), 2109-2115. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2013.0871
Sun, B. C., Hsia, R. Y., Weiss, R. E., Zingmond, D., Liang, L. J., Han, W., … & Asch, S. M. (2013). Effect of emergency department crowding on outcomes of admitted patients. Annals of emergency medicine, 61(6), 605-611. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annemergmed.2012.10.026