While emergency department (ED) crowding has deleterious effects on patient care outcomes and operational efficiency, impacts on the experience for patients discharged from the ED are unknown. We aimed to study how patient-reported experience is affected by ED crowding to characterize which factors most impact discharged patient experience.
Prolonged emergency department (ED) length of stay (LOS) has been shown to adversely affect patient care. We sought to determine factors associated with ED LOS via analysis of a large, national, ED operations database.
Law enforcement officers (LEO) interact with patients and clinicians in the emergency department (ED) for many reasons. There is no current consensus on what should comprise, or how to best enact, guidelines that ideally balance LEO activities in the service of public safety with patient health, autonomy, and privacy. The purpose of this study was to explore how a national sample of emergency physicians (EP) perceives activities of LEOs during the delivery of emergency medical care.
“Excited delirium” (ExD) is purported to represent a certain type of agitated state that can lead to unexpected death. The 2009 “White Paper Report on Excited Delirium Syndrome,” authored by the American College of Emergency Medicine (ACEP) Excited Delirium Task Force, continues to play a pivotal role in defining ExD. Since that report was produced, there has been an increasing appreciation that the label has been applied more often to Black people.
English proficiency and race are both independently known to affect surgical access and quality, but relatively little is known about the impact of race and limited English proficiency (LEP) on admission for emergency surgery from the emergency department (ED). Our objective was to examine the influence of race and English proficiency on admission for emergency surgery from the ED.
Urine drug screens (UDS) have unproven clinical utility in emergency department (ED) chest pain presentations. A test with such limited clinical utility may exponentiate biases in care, but little is known about the epidemiology of UDS use for this indication. We hypothesized that UDS utilization varies nationally across race and gender.
Food insecurity (FI) has been associated with adverse health outcomes and increased healthcare expenditures. Many families experienced reduced access to food during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. A 2019 study revealed that the pre-pandemic prevalence of FI at an urban, tertiary care hospital’s emergency department (ED) was 35.3%. We sought to evaluate whether the prevalence of FI in the same ED patient population increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Emergency medicine (EM) residency programs have variable approaches to educating residents on recognizing and managing healthcare disparities. We hypothesized that our curriculum with resident-presented lectures would increase residents’ sense of cultural humility and ability to identify vulnerable populations.
