Newsweek Article Examines ER Overcrowding

Newsweek released an online exclusive today that explores reasons for emergency room overcrowding. The feature includes the opinions of Dr. Manya Newton, an emergency physician at the University of Michigan. Newton gives thorough answers and suggests solutions, but does not mention urgent care as one of them.

Newton said that emergency room over-crowding is not the result of uninsured patients, but is in fact much more complicated and can be attributed to reasons such as a shortage of primary care doctors, and that the aging U.S. population requires more care.

Newton is a lead author of a recent study that ran in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that looks into emergency room patient demographics.

In the Newsweek interview, Newton said there is no easy solution to the overcrowding.

“We cannot control how many people show up at our door,” Newton said to Newsweek. “We cannot control how soon someone can get a bed. One of the keys is that you can't blame any one part of the system. You can't say this is the ER's fault, or the inpatient services', or primary care's.

“If we keep pointing fingers and blaming people, we're not going to change anything,” Newton added. “This is a system wide problem. All parts of the system need to sit down and discuss it as a whole.”

The closest that Newton comes to mentioning the urgent care industry in the online exclusive was to touch upon the definition of emergency care versus urgent care.

“First, there was a belief that the uninsured are all coming to the emergency department for non-urgent care,” Newton told Newsweek. “That's a tricky one to talk about, because there's no good definition of what ‘non-urgent care’ is — if you have a big cut on your face, or if your baby has a fever and it's one in the morning, that is coded as ‘non-urgent’ by doctors even though it's urgent to you.”

To read the Newsweek item, click here.

To read an ICB blog on this topic, click here.

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