ERs Increasingly Shutting Doors to Ambulances ( L A )

Los Angeles County emergency rooms turned away paramedic ambulances 8% more often in 2005 than a year earlier, with some major hospitals closed more than half the time, according to data from the county Emergency Medical Services Agency.

Public hospitals such as County-USC and Harbor/UCLA medical centers closed to ambulances an average of about 20 hours a day while some private hospitals — including Pasadena's Huntington Hospital, Bellflower Medical Center and Lynwood's St. Francis Medical Center — closed for 12 hours or more.

Could it be that some cultures think that this is a "Free Service"?

Could be. I'm ever perturbed by the number of unnecessary cases which I see at the ER. Colds, flus, sprains and the like. Rather than going to their primary or urgent care clinics they go to the ER and suck up valuable resources (lab time, radiology time, nursing staff time) while patients with life threatening illness must be made to wait. Not just hearing stories, I've seen this first hand.

An annoyance I have to live with is because we went through other levels of care (and ultimately errant diagnosis) rather than straight away to the ER, mom passed away. I don't feel better that professionals missed the nature of her condition until we finally went to the ER for more thorough testing where I saw doctors wondering after delayed test results or the slowness of the queue for radiology. She may have passed anyway but it would've been nice to have had spent real time treating the actual condition only ultimately found by CT.

The ethnic makeup of the ER patients (overwhelmingly non-white) indicates some serious, targeted education effort is warranted to redirect these people to the proper places for treatment for their non-emergency needs. Statistical analysis has shown this as some cultures primary means of obtaining medical care and yet nothing seems to get done about it.

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