Waiting is usually a part of everyday life. But that shouldn’t be the case when waiting puts a person’s life on the line.
Recent research found that between 17% to 34% of critically injured patients statewide are taken to emergency rooms that are not able to treat them, then face life-threatening delays waiting for a transfer to a trauma center that is equipped to deal with their conditions.
Some patients die as a result of these slow hospital transfers, the research by Northwestern University trauma surgeon Dr. Anne Stey found.
These tragic scenarios, one of the failures of our health care system, require action. We urge city and state health officials to come together and devise a plan to keep the situation from getting worse — STAT.
They don’t have to look too far to search for possible answers. Stey, who has dealt with the harrowing challenges of finding immediate care for dying patients, has suggestions that can potentially help, as the Sun-Times’ Kaitlin Washburn reported.
A real-time bed tracker — a system used during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — could provide hospitals real-time data on how many beds other facilities have and whether enough staff is available to treat incoming patients, Stey recommends.
Something as easy as making it simpler for hospitals to share a patient’s full medical records can also ease the burden of doctors who find themselves spending a whole day trying to find an appropriate institution when they could be treating others. And other states have centralized their hospital transport systems, including Minnesota, Arkansas, Washington and Oregon.
A city spokesperson told Washburn that the health department is in “regular dialogue” with Stey. That’s a start, though the spokesperson fell short of saying whether the city is considering actually creating a transfer program and deferred questions about statewide efforts for a patient transfer center to the Illinois Department of Public Health, which didn’t respond to Washburn’s inquiries.
Dialogue on this shouldn’t be placed on the back burner. Emergencies are about urgency, not postponement.
Long wait times are the norm at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or at an Apple store when the latest new iPhone becomes available.
But someone who is desperately in need of life-saving treatment should not wait for hours — when every minute counts.
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