A Canadian study of 4 million emergency department visits at 110 Ontario hospitals found that diverting patients without medical emergencies didn’t improve the timeliness of care given to those with urgent problems, reports the Houston Chronicle. According to the study, to be published in the online Annals of Emergency Medicine, each patient without a true emergency increased the wait for other ED patients by just 32 seconds. “Caring for patients with minor ailments doesn’t lead to clinically important delays, and turning them away isn’t very patient-focused,” study author Michael Schull of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto told the Chronicle.
Many U.S. emergency medicine experts agree that EDs aren’t crowded simply because people use them as clinics. But officials at Harris County’s public hospitals in Texas, which just instituted a new policy of redirecting ED patients with nonurgent problems, maintain that Canadian EDs cannot be compared with U.S. ones, and said that in just three weeks, significantly fewer individuals with minor medical problems have been showing up at the county hospitals’ EDs.
