Public health initiatives in the emergency department: not so good for the public health?

In its formative years, emergency medicine (EM) was meant to have a clear simple mission: manage and stabilize acute illness and decompensated chronic conditions. Definitive, ongoing, and preventive care was meant to occur in traditional well-established primary care settings. During the past three decades, EM has taken on the basic role of being the health care safety net. Even President Bush declared emergency care available to all regardless of ability to pay. The Emergency Medicine Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), an unfunded mandate, borne nearly exclusively by emergency departments (EDs), guarantees access, at least to evaluate whether an emergency exists. For multiple reasons, ED visits have long outstripped ED capacity, leading to severe overcrowding in many EDs. However, given that approximately one-third of the entire U.S. population present to EDs any given year, there have been numerous suggestions and studies advocating for various population-based public health initiatives not necessarily related to ED visits (Table 1).

作 者：

Kelen,GD

刊 名：

Academic emergency medicine 

年，卷(期)：

2008vol.15(no.2) 

分类号：

 

关键词：

Delivery of Health Care  Emergency Service, Hospital  Humans  Mass Screening  卫生保健提供  急诊室, 医院  普查  预防卫生服务  公共卫生  时间因素

正文语种：

eng 

基金项目：