Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Emergency department (ED) crowding is a major public health problem in the United States, with increasing numbers of ED visits, longer lengths of stay in the ED, and the common practice of ED boarding. In the next several years, several measures of ED crowding will be assessed and reported on government websites. In addition, with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), millions more Americans will have health care insurance, many of whom will choose the ED for their care. ⋯ This was achieved through three objectives: 1) a review of interventions that have been implemented to reduce crowding and summarize the evidence of their effectiveness on the delivery of emergency care; 2) to identify strategies within or outside of the health care setting (i.e., policy, engineering, operations management, system design) that may help reduce crowding or improve the quality of emergency care provided during episodes of ED crowding; and 3) to identify the most appropriate design and analytic techniques for rigorously evaluating ED interventions designed to reduce crowding or improve the quality of emergency care provided during episodes of ED crowding. This article describes the background and rationale for the conference and highlights some of the discussions that occurred on the day of the conference. A series of manuscripts on the details of the conference is presented in this issue of Academic Emergency Medicine.
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Ontario is Canada's most populous province, with approximately 12 million people and 130 emergency departments (EDs). Canada has a national single-payer universal health care system, but provinces are responsible for administration. After years of problems and failed attempts to address chronic ED overcrowding, in April 2008 Ontario embarked on an ambitious program to improve system performance through targeted investments (initially CAN$500 million over 3 years) and realigned incentives. ⋯ The greatest improvements were made among the cohort of mainly urban, high-volume EDs that had the worst performance at baseline. This presentation will highlight some of the controversies and challenges and key lessons learned. Overall, the Ontario experience suggests ED overcrowding is a soluble problem, but requires a system-level intervention.
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During the 1990s, relentlessly increasing emergency department (ED) attendances in the United Kingdom led to major dysfunction and ED overcrowding. The situation was exacerbated by outdated ED design, inadequate ED capacity, traditional ED processes, a predominantly junior doctor-based workforce, and insufficient in-hospital beds for patients requiring admission. The crisis led to high-profile lobbying by the U. ⋯ The intention is for these indicators to act as levers for change and to generate a program of continuing improvement in emergency care. The indicators were introduced in England in April 2011, and currently there is a period of bedding-in and collective learning. The quality indicators will be reviewed and refined as required, with any amendments introduced in April 2012.
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Demand for emergency care is rising throughout the western world and represents a major public health problem. Increased reliance on professionalized health care by the public means that strategies need to be developed to manage the demand safely and in a way that is achievable and acceptable to both consumers of emergency care, but also to service providers. In the United Kingdom, strategies have previously been aimed at managing demand better and included introducing new emergency services for patients to access, extending the skills within the existing workforce, and more recently, introducing time targets for emergency departments (EDs). This article will review the effect of these strategies on demand for care and discuss the successes and failures with reference to future plans for tackling this increasingly difficult problem in health care.