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Shortages of beds, doctors and nurses in the Baltimore VA Medical Center’s emergency room resulted in nearly half of a sample of patients spending more than 6 hours at the facility, including one who waited more than 24 hours, according to a critical inspection report released this month. … The Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general’s office detailed the shortcomings in a report that criticized the hospital’s leadership for lacking policies to provide on-call doctors and nurses to boost staffing when patient volume surged. Backups in treating patients led to some being examined in the emergency department’s triage area, without...

Physicians at Montreal’s LaSalle Hospital grew weary of waiting for government funds to improve their hospital, so some of them took matters into their own hands. They posted videos of the emergency room on YouTube. Here’s one, and although it is in French, it’s pretty clear from the start what some of the problems are.

A number of people called our attention to this clip from the popular TV series ER. It really is amazing for secular television. The "Fair Use" law allowed us to teach from it, without violating copyright laws. It has wonderful evangelistic potential, so please use it all over the Internet.

LAHORE: Dozen of media persons have been subjected to the horrible torture by doctors in the presence of police at Jinnah Hospital here on Wednesday. Tension began when media persons went to hospital to cover a demonstration staged by the relative of 60-year-old patient, who died due to alleged negligence of the doctor. The doctors became annoyed when journalists asked them the reason for the death of patient while instead of answering the question, they started beating the media persons. According to Geo correspondent Faisal Karim, media persons were invited for talks at the hospital’s conference room, where they were...

Many people come to the emergency room for heart attacks and auto accidents, but then there's the group who come because of careless and unusual mishaps. TAMPA - One woman fell from a galloping horse while texting. Another woman's bangs caught fire as she peered into a toaster. More than 818 emergency room trips in the past four years involved "chicken" - dead and alive. Yes, big recalls of Toyotas or peanut butter may get the headlines, but millions of Americans with oddball injuries fill emergency rooms every year. Federal regulators review a sample of those visits for signs a...

A Pennsylvania Health Department report says a nurse twice called the name of a Philadelphia man who died of a heart attack in a hospital waiting room but never went to look for him. The report issued Thursday found that hospital staff first called 63-year-old Joaquin (wah-KEEN') Rivera's name 17 minutes after he arrived at Aria Health's Frankford campus on Nov. 28. He had already stopped moving. Hospital personnel checked on Rivera an hour after he arrived only when another patient alerted staff he wasn't moving. Police say Rivera's watch was stolen after he lost consciousness.....

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- A school counselor suffering an apparent heart attack died in a Philadelphia emergency room after waiting nearly 80 minutes for help - and a trio of homeless drug addicts nearby stole his watch instead of seeking aid, police said. Joaquin Rivera, 63, died before seeing a triage nurse at Atria Health's Frankford Campus over the weekend, police said.

DAVIE, Fla. — When the sharp pain shooting through Lisa Strong's back got worse, she thought it was another kidney stone and expected the discomfort to pass. This time was different. Through a series of mistakes, miscommunications and misdiagnoses, she wound up having her arms and legs amputated. She sued the doctors, who essentially blamed one another for what everyone involved agrees were profound errors. Everyone except the jury that ruled against Strong.

He came in at 1 in the morning, and I triaged him. His chief complaint: "Well, my chest kind of hurts, and my girlfriend made me come in." His girlfriend sat next to him, appearing fretful and unhappy. The patient was a 37 year old who appeared to be in general good health. I was tired. It had been a long shift so far, having been spent sticking IVs into dehydrated babies suffering from GI bugs that have been particularly vicious this year. I was shipping demented elderly people to the floor at a record pace, and the nurses in...

Christmas Eve was a solid-gold nightmare. We had one open bed in the entire hospital, and the private ambulance services were bringing in critically-ill people without calling us, because they knew if they did, we would divert them to hospitals that we knew had open beds. But they make their living on calls, not on mileage. (This may differ in other states. Armed & Christian may correct me on this point.) So after the fifth "patient dump," the staff in my ER and the private ambulance services were not experiencing a lot of good will toward each other. And of...

Last night a "GDFD" (get drunk, fall down) was brought into the Emergency Department by aid car. She arrived, as most drunks do, bellowing obscenities and calling the staff vile names. And this young lady was also a spitter. Nice.The law allows us to restrain a patient who poses a threat to himself or to staff, and our MD, a particularly excellent one, wasted no time in decreeing that it be made so. Security is always down there, so we summoned them to help us put the leathers and a spit sock on the young lady. We then shifted her...

WAUKEGAN, Illinois (AP) -- A coroner's jury has declared the death of a heart attack victim who spent almost two hours in a hospital waiting room to be a homicide. Beatrice Vance, 49, died of a heart attack, but the jury at a coroner's inquest ruled Thursday that her death also was "a result of gross deviations from the standard of care that a reasonable person would have exercised in this situation." A spokeswoman for Vista Medical Center in Waukegan, where Vance died July 29, declined to comment on the ruling. (Jury's findings) Vance had waited almost two hours for...

New fees discourage noncritical patients from using emergency rooms Larnita Booker sat patiently in the waiting room at Ben Taub General Hospital's emergency room Tuesday morning, as she always does when she needs to renew a prescription. But when her name was called, she learned the hospital no longer offers that service for free. She could go to one of a dozen community health clinics suggested by Ben Taub counselors, she was told, or she could pay $80 to be seen by a physician at the hospital. "I'm going to have to go somewhere else because I don't have the...

February 14, 2006 HOLLYWOOD AND ACLU VS. CATHOLICISM One of the stories on tonight’s episode of “Boston Legal” concerns a teenage girl who is raped, becomes pregnant and then wants to sue a Catholic hospital for denying her emergency contraception. Catholic League president Bill Donohue took note of this show today: “If there is one Hollywood producer who has shown himself to be positively obsessed with Catholicism, it is David E. Kelley. His treatment of Catholicism on ‘Ally McBeal,’ ‘Picket Fences,’ ‘Chicago Hope,’ ‘Snoops,’ ‘The Practice’ and ‘Boston Legal’ is so well known that we have a big fat file...

Just saw tonight's episode where you had Dr. Kovac, the Catholic from Serbia who lost his wife and 2 children in the Kosovo war, and his babe, another doctor Abby Lockhart, both have been living together, she became pregnant and he told her that it's her body and that it's up to her as to whether or not to have an abortion.  There goes the Rights of the baby to be born and fathers' rights.    At the end of the show Abby decided to keep the baby, her choice not his.   Then in the ER, a 15-year-old girl came in.  Turns out...

Did anyone catch the "ER" episode tonight? It was a direct affront to pro-lifers and Catholics. Luka pushed the whole "personally opposed" agenda. Parental notification was also attacked as the young, pregnant girl was, with Luka's help, able to lie and circumvent the authority of her parents. NBC will here from this Pro Life Catholic.

ASSOCIATED PRESS ATLANTA -- At this city's main trauma hospital, lines of waiting patients clog the hallways - even on slow days. Doctors say they probably couldn't handle a major plane crash or any other incident with more than 20 or 30 severe injuries. "It's a struggle to meet the nightly demand of 911 calls," said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, an ER physician at the hospital, Grady Memorial. "But somehow we're supposed to deal with a ... terrorist bombing? Or a new strain of influenza?" Trauma centers and emergency departments similarly are strained in many U.S. cities, experts say. "Trauma systems...

You'd never know this by reading the news, but yesterday 3,500 emergency physicians showed up on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in white lab coats to petition the Congress for some relief from what ails them. They have some serious concerns, some of which impact all of us in various ways. While hospitals are required by law to provide emergency care to anyone regardless of ability to pay, hospitals do not receive reimbursement from the government for those who cannot pay. It might surprise you to learn that in many cases, neither do the doctors. Many emergency room physicians...

In the fight against terrorism, few stones are left unturned. Every day, patient data from a handful of emergency rooms is sent to the Indiana State Department of Health to be crunched and analyzed. An epidemiologist watches intently for upward trends in rashes, fevers and unexplained deaths. Or a sudden surge in over-the-counter drug sales. The practice -- called syndromic surveillance -- broke onto the public health scene immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and later anthrax deaths. The surveillance method is widely viewed as a tool to detect a possible bioterrorism attack. Computers allow the instant sharing...

Running out of places to care for patients, London's busiest hospital emergency room shut its doors to all but the most severe injuries from outside the city for the first time in its history last week. Two trauma patients had to be diverted during the shutdown, with one patient sent to a hospital in Toronto and the other to Hamilton. The situation hit amid recent reports some London patients have had to wait as long as three days for a hospital bed to become available. "We were in a crisis situation," said Dr. Gary Joubert, chief of emergency medicine for...