Emergency rooms are health care’s front line – in the United States, nearly 45 out of 100 people visit an ER in any given year. But there’s an issue brewing behind the scenes in emergency medical facilities, one that can’t be fixed by a simple stitch or bandage. A new study published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine shows that drug shortages in ERs across the United States increased by more than 400 percent between 2001 and 2014.
The study analyzed data from the University of Utah Drug Information Service, which receives drug shortage reports submitted through a public site administered by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. Two practicing emergency room physicians assessed whether the reported shortages had to do with drugs used in ERs, then looked at whether they were associated with lifesaving or acute conditions.
Of the nearly 1,800 drug shortages reported between 2001 and 2014, nearly 34 percent were used in emergency rooms. More than half (52.6 percent) of all reported shortages were of lifesaving drugs, and 10 percent of shortages affected drugs with no substitute. The […]
That is similar to what happened to my wife in 2014 when a company stopped making Bumex (probably because it was cheap) and the pharmacist and our doctor decided that another drug called Lasix which has been around a long time which was still readily available. The trouble was These two doctors couldn’t figure out how to relate to each other how much of the Lasix they should give her. We found out that they did not give enough, which ended up with my wife’s lungs filling up with fluid and she had a two day stay in the hospital with congestive heart failure and w whopping bill of $15,000 for Medicare, even though she had no surgery, just a change of medication and we, of course, got stuck with $1200 to pay which represents the 80% that Medicare doesn’t pay. This is absurd to. I believe we should not receive any bill for something which never should have happened if the doctors involved knew their jobs. They have both moved on to retirement since then and I believe that incident was the cause.
I meant the 20% Medicare doesn’t pay in that last post, sorry.