| As emergency rooms across Connecticut continue to struggle under heavy loads of patients, with studies showing that patients can wait more than three hours on average to be seen after arrival, State Senator Saud Anwar (D-South Windsor), Senate Chair of the Public Health Committee, led the Senate’s unanimous passage of legislation seeking to collect information and rectify that issue.
“Our emergency rooms are overfull for a number of different reasons. We need to find those reasons and fix the problem in the name of providing better health care in our state,” said Sen. Anwar. “This bill will work to determine a baseline of care. That baseline can then be used to track the effectiveness of future laws and how they impact that figure in years to come. It provides us with an important barometer for our future efforts.”
Senate Bill 181, “An Act Concerning Emergency Department Crowding,” if made law will require private hospitals in Connecticut to collect data on the number of patients receiving emergency room care. That data would include the number of patients who were admitted, the average length of time from arrival in the emergency department to their admission, and the number of patients who were required to wait for an available bed in the emergency department.
That data will be used to inform hospitals of potential methods to improve the efficiency of their admissions, as well as to develop policies to reduce wait times for admission to hospitals after patients present to the emergency department.
Medical professionals testified in support of the legislation in force, citing its potential to show the “scope and severity” of the emergency room concern, according to Jonathan Bankoff, Chairman of Middlesex Health’s Department of Emergency Medicine.
“A first step to solving any problem is to measure it, and that is what this bill proposes to do,” said Melissa Chuongvan-Roy, an emergency medicine physician at Yale New Haven Hospital. “Transparent and accurate data collection, curation and dissemination is important” in trying to address specific problems, she added.
The bill previously passed the Public Health Committee by a unanimous 37-0 vote in March. It now heads to the House for further consideration. |
