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The Denver hospital system is turning away local residents because it is flooded with migrant visits. Denver Health CEO Donna Lynne warned the center is in a crucial moment due to unexpected costs associated with immigrant visits. What I think is not being said is that Denver Health is at a critical, critical point and that we need to take this up in 2024,” Lynne told the Denver City Council, according to the Denver Post. Eight-thousand migrants from Central America accounted for approximately 20,000 visits in 2023. Denver Health asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide funds for immigrants’...

"Deep vein thrombosis (#DVT), a blood clot in a deep vein, can travel to the lungs, leading to a pulmonary embolism (#PE). Symptoms of PE include difficulty breathing and chest pain. Contact your doctor if experiencing symptoms—this is no time to wait." https://mobile.twitter.com/pfizer/status/1493238623633870850

Months of treatment delays have exacerbated chronic conditions and worsened symptoms. Doctors and nurses say the severity of illness ranges widely and includes abdominal pain, respiratory problems, blood clots, heart conditions and suicide attempts, among others. But there's nowhere to put them all. Emergency departments are ideally meant to be brief ports in a storm, with patients staying just long enough to be sent home with instructions to follow up with their primary care physician or being sufficiently stabilized to be transferred "upstairs" to inpatient units or the intensive care unit

He's reported via Facebook that he's had a heart attack.

A&E performance fell to the lowest level on record in March as the NHS continues to face unprecedented pressure. Just 84.6% of accident and emergency patients in England were seen within four hours last month, dropping from 85% in February and compared to 90% in March 2017. And the number of people suffering waits of more than 12 hours more than tripled, compared to the same month the year before. Medics said the backlog created by the situation would leave some hospitals struggling to catch up. President of the Society for Acute Medicine Nick Scriven called the figures the "clearest...

Katherine Smith Lockler, of Milton, Florida, decided to air her frustration Saturday after finishing a 12-hour shift at the hospital, the Miami Herald reported. In the video, titled “After Work Thoughts,” she highlights the heightened risk of catching the flu this season and shares some sassy-toned tips to avoid getting yourself, and other people, sick. To start, she chastised those who bring extra people to the hospital saying it’s “a cesspool of funky flu at the ER right now.” Don’t bring your kid’s sports team, don’t bring your "healthy children" and definitely don’t bring your newborn babies, Lockler said. ......

The idea that spending more on preventive care will reduce overall health care spending is widely believed and often promoted as a reason to support reform. It’s thought that too many people with chronic illnesses wait until they are truly ill before seeking care, often in emergency rooms, where it costs more. It should follow then that treating diseases earlier, or screening for them before they become more serious, would wind up saving money in the long run. Unfortunately, almost none of this is true. Let’s begin with emergency rooms, which many people believed would get less use after passage...

The bizarre incident began around 3 a.m. Wednesday when the elderly woman's caregiver, a 52-year-old woman, called authorities to say people were vandalizing her car. A deputy responded to the home, on East Bay Road in North Bend, but found nothing. The caregiver called back at 5:30 a.m. and was then taken to Bay Area Hospital after deputies suspected the woman might be having a medical issues causing hallucinations. Medical personnel checked her, she appeared fine and returned home. Then the two deputies who worked with the caregiver began having hallucinations and had to be hospitalized. After that, the 78-year-old...

If you had to make a sudden visit to the emergency room, would you have enough money to pay for it without selling something or borrowing the funds from somewhere? Most Americans may not realize this, but this is something that the Federal Reserve has actually been tracking for several years now. And according to the Fed, an astounding 47 percent of all Americans could not come up with $400 to pay for an emergency room visit without borrowing it or selling something. Various surveys that I have talked about in the past have found that more than 60 percent...

No one wants to make a repeat visit to the emergency room for the same complaint, but new research suggests it’s more common than previously thought and surprisingly, people frequently wind up at a different ER the second time around. Already some ERs are taking steps to find out why and try to prevent unnecessary returns. A Philadelphia hospital, for example, is beginning to test video calls and other steps to link discharged patients to primary care. The new research, based on records in six states, suggests patients should be pushy about getting follow-up care so they don’t have to...

The number of patients forced to endure Accident & Emergency trolley waits of up to 12 hours has tripled in four years. New figures from NHS England show that in November, 23,663 patients in England waited between four and 12 hours on a trolley in A&E. In November 2010, the figure was just 6,579. This month also saw 52 patients waiting in A&E for more than 12 hours, compared with just two in the same month four years ago. The figures show the problems are greatest in London, with 273 waits of between four and 12 hours at Barts Health...

A key cost-reducing aim of Obamacare was to reduce expensive emergency room visits by having taxpayers subsidize coverage for the uninsured. However, according to a forthcoming survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians, nearly half of ER doctors report they are seeing more, not fewer, people entering the emergency room. Tenet Healthcare CEO Trevor Fetter told the Wall Street Journal the rise in ER visits is contrary to cost containment. "It's all right with us [because] we run hospitals with emergency rooms, but in terms of the overall cost to the system, you'd want them to find care in...

A third of intensive care beds at weekends are taken up by patients critically ill from alcohol, according to the NHS’s head of critical care. Dr. Bob Winter said it had become socially acceptable for people to drink themselves into an “anesthetized state” on Friday and Saturday nights, and he also warned of the trend of “front-loading”—becoming intoxicated before going out. The prices at supermarkets and off-licenses were so cheap it was possible to buy enough alcohol to “die from” with a £10 note, he added. Dr. Winter called for an urgent change in the culture of drinking and said...

Failure: ObamaCare is driving millions of people into Medicaid, a program we now know does nothing to improve health and actually drives emergency-room use higher. A central premise of ObamaCare was that vastly expanding Medicaid would ultimately save health care dollars. The millions of uninsured gaining access to Medicaid would no longer crowd costly emergency rooms looking for care, the thinking went. And that improved access would keep them healthier. Turns out that neither of those claims is true.

Expanding health insurance coverage for the poor leads to a significant increase in costly emergency room visits, according to a new study. The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, raises the possibility of trouble ahead as millions of people gain health insurance through expansion of Medicaid under the new health care reform law, coverage that began kicking in on Wednesday. The 18-month study followed 25,000 low-income Oregonians who won Medicaid coverage in a lottery as part of the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a major policy research initiative. Researchers observed a 40 percent increase in emergency room visits among the...

A third of GPs say patients should be charged for going to A&E, according to a poll. They want to impose a basic fee of up to £10 a time to deter the public from turning up with “trivial” complaints. A survey of 800 family doctors found that many believe patients are going to A&E at the “drop of the hat” because they can’t be bothered to wait for an appointment. But the findings will prompt anger among members of the public who feel they have no choice but to go to casualty because they can’t see their GP—especially at...

Supporters of President Obama’s health care law had predicted that expanding insurance coverage for the poor would reduce costly emergency room visits as people sought care from primary care doctors. But a rigorous new study conducted in Oregon has flipped that assumption on its head, finding that the newly insured actually went to the emergency room more often. The study, published in the journal Science, compared thousands of low-income people in the Portland area who were randomly selected in a 2008 lottery to get Medicaid coverage with people who entered the lottery but remained uninsured. Those who gained coverage made...

As the media enters day 257,685 openly pushing for gun control, the almost total national-media blackout on the murder trial of Dr. Gosnell, an abortion doctor accused of murdering seven babies, marches on. Wednesday, in the state of Delaware, a very similar story surfaced in local media, naturally: A series of emergency calls made from the Planned Parenthood of Delaware this year are raising concerns about what's happening behind the closed doors. … Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich, former employee said, "It was just unsafe. I couldn't tell you how ridiculously unsafe it was." SNIP Werbrich said "It's not washed down, it's not...

Abstract: Recently, many jurisdictions have implemented bans or imposed taxes upon plastic grocery bags on environmental grounds. San Francisco County was the first major US jurisdiction to enact such a regulation, implementing a ban in 2007. There is evidence, however, that reusable grocery bags, a common substitute for plastic bags, contain potentially harmful bacteria. We examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increase by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar...

There were no beeping machines or blinking lights or scurrying medical residents. A volunteer circulated among the patients like a flight attendant, making soothing conversation and offering reading glasses, Sudoku puzzles and hearing aids. Above them, an artificial sun shined through a skylight imprinted with a photographic rendering of a robin’s-egg-blue sky, puffy clouds and leafy trees. Ms. Spielberger, who is in her 80s, was even getting into the spirit of the place, despite her unnerving condition. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Everything here is wonderful.” Yet this was an emergency room, one specifically designed for the elderly, part of a...