CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
January 15, 2014 | By Eryn Brown
An updated national report on U.S. emergency medical care has again awarded California an “F” for lacking access to speedy treatment, noting that the state has the lowest number of hospital emergency rooms per capita - 6.7 per 1 million people - in the nation. The America's Emergency Care Environment report card, which gauges how well states support emergency care, was released Thursday by the American College of Emergency Physicians, an advocacy group. Tracking 136 measures from sources including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the organization called overcrowding in California emergency wards a “critical problem” and urged the state to increase its healthcare workforce and beef up a variety of facilities to reduce high wait-times for emergency services.
NATIONAL
April 16, 2013 | By Noam N. Levey, Washington Bureau
BOSTON - As 3 o'clock neared Monday afternoon, officials at Brigham and Women's Hospital, one of Boston's premier medical centers, expected this year's marathon would be a nonevent. "We were winding down," said Barry Wante, the hospital's emergency management director. The slow pace was welcome after last year, when unseasonably warm weather led to a rash of heat injuries among runners, inundating the city's hospitals. Full coverage: Explosions at the Boston Marathon But on Monday, the hospital's radios suddenly crackled with reports from the finish line.
NEWS
October 18, 2011 | By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times / for the Booster Shots blog
New estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that emergency room visits rose nearly 10% to 136 million in 2009. The agency reported that: ER visit rates were higher for African Americans than for whites. More than one-third of the ER patients were under 25. More than three-quarters were prescribed medication. Most - 85% - of ER patients had some form of insurance. Only a small number - 8% - came to the emergency room with non-urgent issues.
NEWS
February 8, 2011 | By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times
Local anesthetics are supposed to reduce pain, but the shots themselves can be painful -- sometimes quite painful. But the pain can be reduced substantially by the simple expedient of warming the painkiller before performing the injection, researchers reported Tuesday. The painkillers are normally kept cold to preserve them. Dr. Anna Taddio of the University of Toronto and her colleagues reviewed 18 studies involving a total of 831 patients. They reported online in the Annals of Emergency Medicine that warming the injections before administering them consistently produced a "clinically meaningful reduction in pain" regardless of how the shot was administered or how large an injection was given.
HEALTH
September 6, 2010 | By Harris Meyer, Special to the Los Angeles Times
Melissa Genove has dreamed of becoming a physician since childhood. To help her prepare, she spends as many as 35 hours each week shadowing emergency room doctors at Loma Linda University Medical Center. The 23-year-old listens intently as they examine patients, records their treatment plans in a laptop computer, and follows up on prescriptions, lab tests, consultations with specialists and anything else the doctors order. Genove is not an intern, or even a medical student. She is the chief medical scribe in the hospital's emergency department — and one of several thousand young people pioneering a new healthcare field.
OPINION
January 18, 2009
Re "Recession has some hospitals on the brink," Jan. 14 Never have emergency departments been more crucial than during this economic crisis, when people are losing jobs and insurance. Yet the American College of Emergency Physicians released a national report card on the state of emergency medicine in which California earned a D+ for its lack of support for emergency medicine and ranked last in the country in patients' access to emergency care. Policymakers at state and national levels must focus on making sure lifesaving care is available to everyone.