By Wally Ghurabi, M.D. Guest Commentary
I GOT MY START IN MEDICINE THREE decades ago as an orderly in a small hospital in Michigan, changing bed sheets for the victims of farm mishaps and snowmobile accidents. I was drawn to the fast pace of emergency care, and to what seemed like the magical power of physicians to cure pain. Even now, after 27 years as an emergency room doctor, I find it incredibly gratifying to relieve the suffering of my patients. It’s why I come to work every day.
Back in the old days, if a 40-year-old patient walked into the ER with a heart attack, we gave him oxygen and something for the pain, and he walked out of hospital with a nearly dead heart. Today, if a 40-year-old walks in with heart attack, we can send him out as a completely new person. We save people from every type of accident and tragedy imaginable, and offer patients a second chance in life. I now measure my success by the mountains climbed, the companies started and the families raised by patients who have left my care. They make our world a better place.
Despite these miracles, over the years, I have been struck by a sharpening paradox in American medicine.While we can create technically dazzling medical solutions to solve the most complex health problems, we can’t seem to figure out how to create a health care system to address the basic societal issues, like making sure we have enough doctors or making certain everyone has access to care.
There’s a lot of discussion these days about how America’s health care system is ailing. But no area is more acutely sick than emergency care. Consider this: Over the past decade, as our population has grown by millions and the number of patients has increased by 26 percent, an emergency room has closed, on average, once every eight days. In the Los Angeles area alone, 10 ERs shut their doors. We have more and more patients going to fewer and fewer facilities.
By federal law, our nation’s emergency rooms must attend to every patient that walks through our doors. We play this role gladly. But many hospitals are buckling under the strain, and the news is filled with terrible stories of where patients fell through the cracks. The average ER wait time, nationwide, is now close to four hours. A colleague of mine at the State University of New York-Stony Brook estimates physicians could save up to 25 out of every 100 deaths if not for this overcrowding.
True health care reform will require us to solve the emergency room crisis in this country.
As with most things in life, big solutions require taking one step at a time. I’m proud to say that my hospital — Santa Monica- UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital — is taking a step toward helping our community. Rather than announcing an ER closure, we are opening, on Wednesday, a state-of-the-art emergency department that will provide more efficient care in a more comfortable environment to 30,000 patients a year on the west side of Los Angeles.
The 14,000-square-foot Nethercutt Emergency Center offers everything from a soothing, ultra-efficient design, by architect Robert A.M. Stern, to our special pediatric beds to our on-site 64-slice CT Scanner that takes much better images using less radiation. This is the truly ER of the future.
Back when I was an orderly in Michigan, I was awed by the appreciation my patients expressed for our care. One former patient of mine even comes in every few weeks with brownies carefully wrapped in aluminum foil and labeled for me and my staff. They’re delicious.
On July 15, we held an open house for the Nethercutt Emergency Center, including tours of the facility, free health screenings, and food and entertainment. It was our way of reintroducing ourselves to a community we’ve been proud to serve for so many years.
DR. WALLY GHURABI is medical director of the Emergency Center at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 24, 2007. Read the original PDF.