Leaving room for real emergencies

Emergency rooms in hospitals are flooded with cases that ought to be seen by GPs or outpatient clinics. Educating patients about the difference will help improve hospitals' ability to cope with real emergencies.

Every single bed in a hospital emergency department is valuable. The nature of this sector of medicine is that a major road collision or a serious industrial accident can see hospitals change in an instant from being quiet to being desperately overloaded, with patients’ lives dependent on the delivery of quick and skilled treatment.

But many people in the UAE don’t seem to consider this, which is why they decide to go to the emergency unit instead of visiting their general practitioner or primary health care centres when they are suffering from minor ailments. Because emergency departments are open 24 hours and the staff usually respond quickly, many patients prefer them, with some attending simply to renew their prescriptions.

As The National reported yesterday, the medical director at the trauma centre at Rashid Hospital in Dubai, Dr Moin Fikree, has urged patients to stay away from the hospital's emergency unit if their cases are not critical. Out of the tens of thousands of patients the country's busiest trauma centre receives every year, about 12 per cent are not in genuine need of emergency care.

The problem is even worse at some other UAE hospitals. In Ajman, a survey of patients presenting to Sheikh Khalifa Hospital's emergency department showed that about 40 per cent were not emergencies. A survey in 2010 at Saqr Hospital in Ras Al Khaimah showed 73 per cent of patients at the emergency department had only minor conditions. Medical staff waste valuable time examining these patients before deciding to transfer them to outpatient clinics. This process increases the pressure on emergency personnel and delays the treatment of genuinely critical cases – and delays of just a few minutes can mean the difference between life and death for a heart attack, stroke or trauma victim.

While hospitals have a responsibility to provide high levels of care for everybody, patients also have a responsibility to think about others when deciding where to seek medical help. There should be more awareness of this responsibility. Hospital staff should help patients learn to differentiate between illnesses that require immediate attention and those that can be better dealt with by outpatient clinics. For the sake of quality of care during genuine emergencies, the flood of non-urgent cases to emergency departments must be halted.