Healthcare Update Satellite 10-28-2013

According to this study of 1165 homeless Canadian patients in the American Journal of Public Health, when compared with a control population, homeless patients used the emergency department 8.5 times more often, were hospitalized 4.2 times more often for medical/surgical problems, and were hospitalized 9.2 times more often for psychiatric hospitalizations. According to this accompanying study, the average ED utilization for homeless patients was 2 visits per year, but 10% of the sample population accounted for more than 60% of all ED visits. Drug seeking behaviors permeate emergency medicine. Opiate overdoses resulted in more than 100,000 ED visits in 2009. Now more and more patients with Toradol “allergies” are being tracked and put into “non-medical” treatment programs. In other words, keeping “The List” is becoming standard practice in many emergency departments. Massachusetts Medical Board gone wild? Bariatric surgeon who has performed more than 6000 weight loss operations in his career and who reportedly has complication rates better than or equal to the national average has his license suspended because he uses open gastric bypass surgery rather than performing laparoscopic procedures and because he allegedly did not recognize and treat post operative complications in four patients quickly enough. Interesting to note that bariatric surgery death rates range from 1 in 100 patients to 1 in 300 patients, meaning that it would be expected that this physi...
Source: WhiteCoat's Call Room - Category: Emergency Medicine Doctors Authors: Tags: Healthcare Update Source Type: blogs