There have been more and more news articles emphasizing overcrowded emergency departments in hospitals throughout the country, and the growing number of people needing emergency care daily. It is this dilemma within emergency departments that is making the freestanding emergency room, a growing trend in emergency patient care.
Kaiser Health News’ ran a recent feature story, “Emergency Care, But Not At A Hospital,” and it talks about how this new option, which until recently, was found mostly in rural areas of the United States, is beginning to grow at a heightened rate.
A series of three reports by the Institute of Medicine, in 2006, described a plethora of problems with U.S. emergency care. The reports concluded that forty percent of emergency rooms are overcrowded on a daily basis. And sometimes, patients who need to be admitted to the hospital wait hours, and sometimes days, for a bed to open up.
Freestanding emergency rooms are just that. They are emergency departments, sans the hospital. These types of facilities should not be confused with urgent care centers.
Some differences include hours, as with urgent care, there are set hours of operation; freestanding emergency departments, like hospital emergency rooms, do not close. Nurses and medical doctors are always on site, whether they are employed by the healthcare system that runs the freestanding emergency department, or the staff is put in place by an outsourced physician services company; sometimes urgent care centers have medical doctors, but many times a nurse practitioner is the sole healthcare provider on site.
The American Hospital Association conducted a study and found that there were more than 240 freestanding emergency departments in 2009 (that’s more than 50 percent of the number researched in 2004). Nearly 20 states have such facilities, all equipped with providers of physician services, who are capable of handling typical emergency room cases.
However, the article also reported that, “services at these facilities get high marks, but questions remain about whether they’re the best choice for some serious medical problems, such as heart attacks. And some policy experts say the facilities may not be serving the people who need them most.”
“If they diagnose you as having a heart attack, they’re going to bypass our freestanding emergency room and go straight to the cath lab at the hospital,” says Dr. John Milne, vice president for medical affairs at Swedish Health System.
“Cath lab” is a catheterization lab, having to do with a type of facility for diagnosing and treating heart problems.
In most cases, freestanding emergency rooms that are not a part of a bigger healthcare system, form partnerships with local hospitals and those emergency departments, and will have patients transferred to better equipped facilities, should the patient require special treatment.
Either way, these types of facilities are giving some positive options in regards to patient care. People who utilize them will not have to wait as long as in a hospital emergency departments, and with fewer patients to care for, physicians can spend more time on the ones who they see, providing a higher level of care.