Emergency Department Crowding in Relation to In-hospital Adverse Medical Events

Plain-language summary

Since the report "To Err is Human" by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1999, attention was brought to the general public that adverse events in medicine are common and are one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality within the United States. The report estimates that 44,000 - 98,000 patients hospitalized in the United States die each year as a result of medical errors. In spite of the growing patient safety movement worldwide, health care has not become measurably safer. Health care is one of the few risk-prone areas in which public demand limits the use of common-sense safety-enhancing solutions, such as limiting the flow and choosing the type of incoming patients. The latter is especially true for emergency departments (EDs) since they deliver an important public service by providing emergency care 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, without discrimination by social or economic status. One of the key expectations of EDs is the ability to provide immediate access and stabilization for those patients who have an emergency medical condition. However, emergency department (ED) crowding is recognized to be a major, international problem that affects patients and providers. A recent report from the IOM noted that the increasing strain caused by crowding is creating a deficit in quality of emergency care. Crowding has been associated with reduced access to emergency medical services, delays in care for cardiac patients, increased patient mortality, inadequate pain management, increased costs of patient care, and delays in administration of antibiotic therapy. Several issues remain concerning ED crowding and it's relation to adverse events. First, the existing evidence on adverse event occurrence during ED crowding is largely anecdotal and inconclusive. Secondly, although a few studies showed a relationship between ED crowding and mortality, neither of these examined the causes of excess mortality. Finally, although a significant increase in the average length of hospital stay was shown during ED crowding the reasons for this are open to speculation. The purpose of this study therefore is to identify six explicit adverse events and mortality for patients who were admitted through ED and to compare these results in relation to ED crowding. This will provide us novel insight into the reasons for the hypothesized increased mortality during ED crowding.

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