Emergency Advocacy

In my first weekly conference as an emergency medicine intern at Yale, we had several lectures. Topics included D-dimer in pulmonary embolism, atrial fibrillation, chest x-ray reading and emergency medicine advocacy. What? Advocacy in the classroom? One of our EM professors is an expert in the subjects of accident prevention policy, so she gave us a primer on what we can do as new doctors to contribute to the current health care debate. Here's the letter I wrote this morning on my day off.

Dear (Insert CT lawmaker name here),

I am a resident physician in the Yale-New Haven Hospital emergency department. I'm writing to tell you a little bit about ER conditions so that you will have a sense of how emergency care is an important issue that should be included in the currently debated health plan. A health care plan in our country cannot be comprehensive if it does not address emergency care.

When I show up for my 12 hour shift at Yale's level one trauma center, I am immediately inundated with an atmosphere that to an outsider could be perceived as chaos. The scene is far from the clean depictions on your television set, and believe me, there is not time for the intrigue that home viewers expect from “Grey's Anatomy.” Every night at many of the top hospitals in this country, patients sit in emergency room hallways for lack of private rooms. It is not unusual for these folks to receive all of their care in the hallway. I will personally wheel patients in and out of rooms so that they may have the dignity of a private exam. It breaks my heart to tell these folks, “We'll only be in here for 10 minutes before I take you back out into the hallway.” Can you imagine your doctor saying, “You have appendicitis and will need surgery, but until then try to make yourself comfortable on this hallway stretcher,” like I have? When you are having the worst pain of your life, you can't understand there is someone sicker than you.

This brings me to the health plan. There are always really sick patients. President Obama has been championing primary care as the centerpiece of his plan; and rightly so: prevention and a steady relationship with one doctor will go far to reduce health care costs. But increasing resources to primary care will not alleviate the overcrowding problems we face in delivering emergency care. For example, with 97% of the population in nearby Massachusetts insured, ER use has increased by nearly 10%. A refrain we physicians wish to emphasize is: coverage does not equal access. Where do people go when they get sick after hours?

I am familiar with and applaud sections 214 and 215 of the current Senate bill (“Systems for Emergency Care...” and “Trauma Centers...” in “Quality, Affordable Health Care for all Americans” submitted by Sen. Reid), and hope you will support these provisions. The grants and mandates are based on recommendations a 2006 Institute of Medicine report and will go far to improve care through one of the most frequent access points for people in need. In the interim, I'll do my part to see as many patients as I can safely handle so that our ER's hallways are used for walking, not patient care.

Sincerely,

Thomas Robey, M.D., Ph.D.

If you are wondering why I don't post more here in the next year, it's because I'll be using my time to write other things. Such as letters like this...

Emergency Policy

Now that I'll be moving to Connecticut to further my medical education, I've tried to start paying attention to health policy in that state. An article in the New York Times today sated my weekly appetite for such information. The punchline is that in this difficult budget cycle, the governor of CT (M. Jodi Rell) has proposed cutting state support to the state's only emergency flight system. LifeStar is headquartered in Hartford, but as this map shows, conducts about 250 flights a year to the Yale-New Haven Hospital.

If the cuts are approved, there will be financial capacity for only about half of the flights now made. The governor's office cites that this program is run from a private hospital as a reason to be included in the cuts. The problem with this reasoning is that there is no other service in the state making this kind of transport. According to the article, legislators on an appropriations subcommittee recently recommended restoring the entire $1.4 million that was cut. Even so, I think it's reasonable to engage in discussions about the cost of emergency transport. It seems to me the $9000 per flight cost is worth saving a life.

Access to Care

The five or six readers who have stuck with me these last few months and haven't banished me from their readers will know that the claim to health care is one of my personal, ethical and political interests. Which reminds me that I need to read up about Health and Human Services nominee Kathleen Sebelius. But one of the reasons I've not been able to do my homework on her, or write in this blog is the Ethics in the ER course I'm teaching this quarter. I've been using a blog to move the discussion beyond the classroom. I think it's been working. The students who post comments have shown great insight and offered poignant reflections.

Anyway, while researching this week's topic, I ran across a couple of media clips that could be interesting to folks who think health care reimbursement needs to be reformed. Remember Harry and Louise? They were the middle class couple in the mid '90s who didn't take very kindly to the Clinton health care plan. Last year, a consortium of lobbying groups turned that technique on its head. I think they even found the same actors. It's worth heating over to the Ethics in the ER blog to check them out side by side!