The long waits that government inspectors say endanger emergency room patients at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center can also be found in backlogged hospitals across the country, according to emergency care experts who have been trying for years to draw attention to the nation's overloaded safety net.
"Overcrowding in our emergency departments is a national crisis," said Dr. Linda Lawrence, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, an advocacy group based in Washington D.C. "We no longer have the capacity to serve as the safety net for society."
The group surveyed 1,000 emergency care physicians in September and found that one in five knew of a patient who had died because of having to wait too long for care, Lawrence said.
The death of an emergency room patient in December at Harbor-UCLA prompted California health officials, acting on behalf of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to inspect the L.A. County hospital. William Harold Jones Jr., 56, was admitted to the emergency room on Dec. 22 but left the hospital before treatment was finished. His absence went unnoticed for hours before he was found dead on a sidewalk across the street.
County officials released a statement earlier this week that said they expected Harbor-UCLA to be cited for placing patients in "immediate jeopardy."
Harbor-UCLA is the third hospital owned by Los Angeles County to undergo federal scrutiny in recent months for emergency room deaths.
"When somebody dies or somebody walks out the door and drops dead or a kid dies in the back of an ambulance, the typical press reaction is find the nurse, find the doctor, and crucify them," said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, professor and chairman of emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. "UCLA-Harbor . . . [has] been operating right on the edge in terms of volume of care for years. There's just not any room left. This is the death spiral of American medicine, if we don't figure out what to do."
Report after report has laid out the crisis.
A review of 90,000 emergency room visits nationwide from 1997 to 2004 found that one in four heart attack patients waited almost an hour after arriving in a hospital emergency room before receiving care. Heart attack patients waited 150% longer for care by the end of the study period, or 20 minutes on average, up from eight minutes in 1997, according to the Harvard Medical School study published last month in the journal Health Affairs.
