Alaska Regional Hospital is at it again, with a request to be allowed to build a “freestanding emergency department” in South Anchorage. They were denied before, because it is such a waste of patients’ money and wouldn’t solve any actual problem.
When asked why they think an ED is needed in South Anchorage, they say it is because it is so far away from Midtown, where the hospitals are; when asked how they expect the quality of care to be equal when they won’t have surgery, ICU, cardiac catheterization and more on-site, they say no problem — it’s only a short 10 minutes from a real hospital.
Let’s see — you have chest pain, you are having a heart attack, and every minute you do not have reperfusion treatment means lost heart muscle and possibly a difference between returning to normal life or having chronic fatigue and shortness of breath. You get a ride to the freestanding ED, which takes 20 minutes, if you are lucky.
The staff figures out you need cardiac catheterization in 15 minutes. Now you get another ambulance ride to a real hospital, which takes, according to Alaska Regional Hospital, 10 minutes.
At the hospital, the staff has to figure out your care, move you around and more. Another 10 minutes. Fifty-five minutes total.
If your ambulance had driven past the FSED directly to a real hospital, it would have been 25 minutes to get there and 15 minutes for evaluation — 40 minutes total.
But this is not the real reason Regional wants a freestanding ED. Most of the ED patients won’t need critical care or hospitalization — probably 90% could be handled in an urgent care clinic with a CT scanner. However, urgent care clinics can’t charge enormous ED fees. Those huge fees are for the purpose of covering the overhead costs of — you guessed it — the attached hospital. Without the attached hospital, the ED fees are just huge profits. They want to site it in South Anchorage, where the wealthier people live. The added cost of having the same service provided in a freestanding ED vs. an urgent care clinic will be paid by insurance, which will then raise everyone’s premiums in the whole community. So we will all be paying for Regional’s excess profits while receiving essentially no value in return. A great deal for America’s biggest for-profit health system.
One real problem with ED waits in Anchorage is the patients sitting in the EDs waiting for inpatient beds to become available, backing up the ED system. If Alaska Regional is serious about helping improve ED access, they should open up some of the unused licensed beds they have been sitting on for years.
— Dr. Harold Johnston
Anchorage
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