Ultimately, there are many ways to address ED crowding and boarding. What’s clear from the emerging data: our experience as clinicians as well as our patients’ is that the system is unraveling. ED crowding and boarding are causing patient experiences and outcomes to worsen. The question is not whether the government should act, but how.  The time is now to address this longstanding, progressively worsening, public-health crisis. 

References

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DR. RAHMAN is a 2022–2023 clinical innovations fellow at US Acute Care Solutions and works clinically at LifeBridge Health in Baltimore. He went to medical school at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and completed emergency medicine residency at St. John‘s Riverside Hospital in Yonkers, N.Y., where he served as chief resident.