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DrThrowaway4444 t1_iwsliad wrote

Reply to comment by itstheoneontheleft in Saw A Woman Die Waiting To Be Seen At UMASS ER Last Night by incandesantlite

While the C-Suite certainly has some blame in this situation, I don't think it's as much as you're attributing to them. The main issues I see are limited staffing and lack of appropriate and timely follow up in PCP offices. I would estimate 50% or more of the patients going to the ED should be going to their primary care doctor. But they either don't have one because it's so hard to get an appointment, or they were given an appointment several weeks in the future and the patient decided to go to the ED instead.

A hospital can't just increase capacity overnight, it's a multi-year long process. With the influx of patients from St Vincent's, it's been a nightmare.

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FalsePattern6258 t1_iwt1hrs wrote

Agreed. I'm pretty sure this is a nationwide thing. Shortage of PCPs too. Shortage of nurses, physicians, pharmacists, most healthcare professionals. Yet the government decided that Medicare reimbursement for hospitals should be further decreased (it was already low compared to private insurances), meaning hospitals like UMass that get a lot of patients on Medicare and Medicaid get even less funding. As a safety net hospital, it's already difficult to stay afloat financially but I think this huge mess goes all the way up to our government. At its core, our healthcare system is so messed up. We have an aging population and have not figured out how to solve the healthcare worker shortage, and the current healthcare workers are becoming stretched so thin and burned out and patients are dying because of it.

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Neyabenz t1_iwt86mk wrote

Or they have inadequate insurance and try to tough it out. Because capitalism.

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