A large study in the United Kingdom lays out the deadly consequences of delayed critical care as emergency rooms worldwide are flooded with new COVID-19 patients.
Almost 27 million people went to the emergency room in England in the past two years, waiting on average five hours for a course of action. The National Health Service adopted a four-hour operational standard back in 2004.
After five hours of waiting, nearly 434,000 of those attendees would pass away.
If a patient had to wait between six to eight hours, they were more likely to die in the next 30 days. Every patient who wasn't treated within six hours had an extra death.
If a patient had to wait more than eight hours, their chance of dying over the next month increased to 10 percent.
The four-hour operational target is important to patient safety, as many of us have always known, according to an editorial written by a physician from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
Patients will continue to be grateful for the publication of this paper.
In Australia and the United States, the same operational targets are in place, but that doesn't mean ERs consistently enforce the standards.
It took the average patient in the UK just under five hours to get a bed in the emergency room. Forty percent of patients were waiting more than four hours in the past two years.
They can't tell us why wait times are linked to higher death rates.
Delaying critical care can lead to severe and sometimes fatal outcomes, according to researchers.
Patients may have delayed access to life-saving treatments if there are not enough emergency room beds. It's usually at night when staffing levels are lowest when these patients are finally admitted.
Older people are more susceptible to infections and delirium due to an increase in the length of time patients spend in the hospital.
The risks in a global Pandemic are even greater. The UK had a record 6 million people on hospital waiting lists before the Omicron variant spread.
Patients with serious ailments can sometimes wait five days to be admitted to the ER.
Doctors in the UK have seen this coming for a long time.
The National Health Service had fewer acute beds relative to the population than almost any other similar health system in the world.
"For at least the last 12 years and more, we have seen cuts after cuts to the budget of the NHS, leading to reduced bed numbers and staffing," writes Prentice in the new editorial.
This is bad enough in itself, but it has been compounded by the reduction in central government financial support to local authorities, with a devastating impact on social care. Thanks to this report, we now have confirmation that patients die because of delayed discharge.
The journal published the study.
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