Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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problems with on-call specialist physician coverage have been identified as a significant issue for our nation's health care system. Despite this, little is known about the full extent of these coverage deficiencies in emergency departments (EDs), their effect on emergency care provision, or the subsequent effect on patient flow should specialist-requiring patients need to be transferred to centers of higher-level care. The objective was to report the experiences of a national sample of ED directors regarding the degree of difficulty in providing specialist coverage and the effect of on-call coverage problems on emergency patient care. ⋯ difficulties in obtaining specialty on-call coverage are a pervasive issue for EDs at the national level. Emergency care provision appears to have been affected, and this issue is further impacted by a perceived unreliability in current on-call coverage provision as well as the attrition of coverage for individual specialties.
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This article reflects the proceedings of a breakout session, "Beyond ED Categorization-Matching Networks to Patient Needs," at the 2010 Academic Emergency Medicine consensus conference, "Beyond Regionalization: Integrated Networks of Emergency Care." It is based on concepts and areas of priority identified and developed by the authors and participants at the conference. The paper first describes definitions fundamental to understanding the categorization, designation, and regionalization of emergency care and then considers a conceptual framework for this process. It also provides a justification for a categorization system being integrated into a regionalized emergency care system. Finally, it discusses potential challenges and barriers to the adoption of a categorization and designation system for emergency care and the opportunities for researchers to study the many issues associated with the implementation of such a system.
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This article summarizes the discussions of the emergency medical services (EMS) breakout session at the June 2010 Academic Emergency Medicine consensus conference "Beyond Regionalization: Integrated Networks of Emergency Care." The group focused on prehospital issues such as the identification of patients by EMS personnel, protocol-driven destination selection, bypassing closer nondesignated centers to transport patients directly to more distant designated specialty centers, and the modes of transport to be used as they relate to the regionalization of emergency care. It is our hope that the proposed research agenda will be advanced in a way that begins to rigorously approach the unanswered research questions and that these answers, in turn, will lead to an evidence-based, cohesive, comprehensive, and more uniform set of guidelines that govern the delivery and practice of prehospital emergency care.
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The 2010 Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM) consensus conference "Beyond Regionalization" aimed to place the design of a 21st century emergency care delivery system at the center of emergency medicine's (EM's) health policy research agenda. To examine the lessons learned from existing regional systems, consensus conference organizers convened a panel discussion made up of experts from the fields of acute care surgery, interventional cardiology, acute ischemic stroke, cardiac arrest, critical care medicine, pediatric EM, and medical toxicology. The organizers asked that each member provide insight into the barriers that slowed network creation and the solutions that allowed them to overcome barriers. ⋯ Finally, the importance of establishing a robust reimbursement mechanism was illustrated by the threatened closure of poison control centers nationwide. The panel discussion added valuable insight into the possibilities of maximizing patient outcomes through regionalized systems of emergency care. A primary challenge remaining is for EM to help to integrate the existing and developing disease-based systems of care into a more comprehensive emergency care system.
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The provision of emergency care in the United States, regionalized or not, depends on an adequate workforce. Adequate must be defined both qualitatively and quantitatively. There is currently a shortage of emergency care providers, one that will exist for the foreseeable future. This article discusses what is known about the current emergency medicine (EM) and non-EM workforce, future trends, and research opportunities.