That’s why they call it dope, sister. Upset woman searching for boyfriend’s missing finger draws attention of police. Boyfriend was inside emergency department having a laceration repaired on his intact finger. Police find syringe full of methamphetamine in seat where boyfriend was sitting. Woman and boyfriend both arrested.

Emergency department haiku. This guy is good.

Australian government web site showing emergency department waiting times shown to post inaccurate information, not to update information for days, and alleged to be a “waste of resources.”
One leader opposing the site says that “people don’t go to emergency departments unless they need to be there. If they need to be there, they will go to the closest one. Not review a website first.”
Don’t worry. Nothing like this would ever happen in the US.

Another article on how hospital rankings are arbitrary. Feds’ Hospital Compare website measures outcomes one way, US News measures same outcomes an entirely different way. Patients or administrators who believe either set of rankings end up being the real losers.
A man with one watch always knows the time. A man with two watches is never sure. A man who reads a watch that measures time in ounces is just a dimwit.

Trying to avoid the “Code Zero.” Last year, 4000 patients waited at least 10 minutes to get a hospital bed after being transported by ambulance. During those waits, the paramedics aren’t available to take other calls. When all the ambulances are busy, it’s called a Code Zero. Hospitals blame the delays on crowding due to non-urgent patients.

What? Governmental requirements for faster care actually slow care down? You don’t say. Canadian requirement that emergency department patients should not wait more than 4 hours between arrival and admission “hits the target but misses the point.” Wait times after the cutoff was implemented actually went up and “activity in the last 20 minutes of the four-hour window grew every year since the rule was introduced.” When one patient is near the four hour mark and another is ready to be discharged at 1 hour, the 3.5 hour patient will attract much more resources in order to meet the cutoff. The 1 hour patient will wait much longer because the staff is worried about preventing waits from going over the 4 hour cutoff.
Like this wasn’t foreseeable?

Will the next pandemic influenza candidate please step forward. New strain of swine flu discovered. Combines previous H1N1 genetic material with rare H3N2 genetic material. Limited coverage afforded from current year’s vaccinations. Save up so that you can afford the Tamiflu prescriptions.

This week’s edition of patients gone wild. Georgia man becomes upset in emergency department, kicks holes in wall, then shouts obscenities. Now in jail on disorderly conduct charges.

More patients gone wild. Man shoots and kills former girlfriend in a Chicago hospital parking garage.

Another patient gone wild. Man kicks police officer in back of head in Hawaii emergency department.

Yup, there’s more. Prison inmate coming to the emergency department for a medical condition tries to steal guard’s gun. Shots go off. No one is hurt. Inmate gets moved to extended-stay Greybar Motel.

That wasn’t a donation, it was his deductible. Connecticut hospital gets a $1.4 million donation from a businessman who credited the hospital with saving him from septic shock.

It’s not the “ICU” anymore, it’s the “Eye See You.” Cameras over the sinks in one hospital’s ICU increase hand washing rates significantly. Whether washing one’s hands scores of times per day has any real effect on decreasing infection rates in hospitals … who cares? That’s irrelevant when a clipboard brigade can get highly educated health care providers to act like lab rats with a simple camera and LED display.

Antibiotics make you fat? Interesting correlation between states with the highest antibiotic use and states with highest number of deaths from strokes, highest number of patients with heart attacks, highest diabetes rates and greatest obesity rates.
Sounds wacky, but I think that the correlation needs to be given more study. We have a lot to learn about the effects of intestinal flora on our systems. I have long been a believer that dysbiosis is responsible for a lot of unexplained human ailments.

Bakersfield, California hospitals are so busy that the emergency departments often are overwhelmed to the point that they go on bypass to ambulances. Now, because some patients are getting sent to hospitals that aren’t covered by their insurance, the state is considering whether to do away with “closure” to ambulances and to force already overwhelmed departments to take even more patients.
Administrators say that such a policy will make hospitals “more creative.”
Instead, the policy will cause longer waits, fewer ambulances on the street (crews will have to wait with patients until the patients get a bed), and more deaths.
I think that California has now become the second suckiest state in which to practice medicine.

California legislators are embracing the expansion of Medicaid coverage in their state. That’s because they’re getting extra money from the federal government. Wait until the money dries up. Then they’ll be singing another tune. Think that emergency departments are overcrowded now?

What’s the suckiest state in which to be infected with the HIV? If you live there and are black, you’re ten times more likely to die than if you’re white.

Capitalism at its finest. Obama administration grants multimillion dollar contract to Siga Technoligies for smallpox vaccine.
Did I mention that the company’s controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald Perelman – a longtime Democratic Party donor.
Oh, and the Obama administration blocked other corporations from bidding on the contract.
Oh, and the government paid $255 per dose for 1.7 million doses of the vaccine – well above the “reasonable” price for the vaccine.
Oh, and smallpox has been eradicated for more than 30 years.
Oh, and the government already owns $1 billion worth of smallpox vaccine at $3 per dose which would prevent death if given within 4 days of exposure to smallpox.
Oh, and the new drug cannot even be tested to see if it works because of ethical constraints.
In other words, our president funneled $433 million to a crony’s corporation for a medication we don’t reasonably need and that can’t even be tested to see if it works.
For all we know, it could be little $255 sugar pills.
We’re from the government and we’re here to help.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2011 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Healthcare Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.