NY Times Take on Annals ED Utilization Study

From the New York Times:
It is often said that emergency rooms are crowded because of the disproportionate number of uninsured people using them. But data based on telephone surveys and in-person interviews, published on April 14 in The Annals of Emergency Medicine, tell a different story. The number of uninsured people nationwide rose to 15.7 [...]

Who Should Not Be Saved in a Pandemic?

From AOL.com
Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won’t get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding who to let die.
Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn’t be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma [...]

More on “Never Events”

From the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
Should “never events” really never happen? Eliminating some mishaps that should never happen is a laudable goal, but just isn’t possible 100% of the time, some inside the medical establishment say.
Nancy Foster, the American Hospital Association’s VP for quality and patient safety policy, took issue with whether there’s strong [...]