a stitch, and time

[kirkcudbright]

Tonight at skating, Kylie fell and cut her chin - about ¾" long, and deep, although it looked more like a scrape when it was still bleeding. Even when it was still bleeding (which wasn't long), she was more upset about cutting short her skating lesson than about cutting her chin.

Three hours at the ER, and six stitches later, we're home. Midnight dinner of bacon and eggs, because the hens have been laying them faster than we've been eating them.

It wasn't an especially busy night at the ER - it wasn't crowded, there weren't any ambulance admissions, just the normal flow of everyday injuries and illnesses. Still, it was over an hour before we were seen by a triage nurse, and sent back to the waiting room. When we finally got into an exam room, it was 45 minutes before the doctor arrived. She was friendly and professional, and didn't rush her work, but it was 11pm, and we just wanted to go home, get dinner, and go to bed.

This isn't a Sicko rant, it's just one experience at a suburban hospital, but you can't help thinking, during the three hours you have to think, that one way to control health care costs is to discourage people from using emergency and urgent-care services, and one way to do that is to make it tedious; it doesn't even have to be unpleasant - the tedium should drive most people off.

Comments

[mrw42.livejournal.com]

Poor Kylie! I hope it heals quickly.

[catness.livejournal.com]

I've spent many many many hours in ERs and urgent care, as a patient, as an EMS provider, and waiting for and with my buddies (who are inexplicably *cough* in hospitals for trauma injuries with some regularity).

The tedium isn't by design; it really is because too many people use the resources for things they could get solved another way. However, even if they didn't, emergent services would still be too busy. There really isn't any such thing as wasted time in an urgent care facility, from a provider standpoint. There would be no time to plan to make someone wait. :/

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

In my experience, the health care system is screwed in such a way that the ER is the only place to get service in anything like a sane timeframe. When I was a teenager, when I got sick we called the doctor's practice and I saw one of the three partners in the next day or two. In the past decade, when I've gotton sick it's either go to the ER or wait two to twelve weeks. And the ER docs I've seen pay far more attention than the GPs, whose time in compressed to fifteen or twenty minute chunks, an insane pace. I'm kinda unclear on how this situation arose and is tolerated; our system is awesome at emergencies and very good at ongoing life-threatening stuff, but terrible at routine care, an odd combination.

[jiapa.livejournal.com]

mm-hmm. That's part of it. Another part is that because the poor don't have health insurance, they delay care until they really need it, and then use the ER as a drop in clinic since the ERs aren't allowed to turn anyone who is sick away. They can bill 'em later for everything they can get, but if the patient doesn't have anything, the hospital eats the cost, so if you're really _really_ poor and can't imagine yourself ever getting un-poor, the ER is the cheapest way to get health care.

Staffing up the ER is both expensive and actually inappropriate -- the ER docs aren't trained to be general practitioners.

OTOH, Universal Health Care would solve the crowded ER problem in a much more medically correct way, just by sending all the non-ER problems to non-ER docs.

Physicians for a National Health Program: http://www.pnhp.org/

[docorion.livejournal.com]

What she said. Exactly, word for word.