Hospitals Building Emergency Rooms for the Elderly - NYTimes.com

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By ALYSON MARTIN and NUSHIN RASHIDIAN

Hospitals nationwide are trying to redefine the E.R. experience for the elderly by building facilities dedicated solely to their needs. St. Joseph Mercy’s parent company, Trinity Health System, opened the nation’s first senior E.R. at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Md., in 2008 and plans to put one in 19 other hospitals by 2013. Senior E.R.’s, also called geriatric emergency departments, also have opened in Texas, New Jersey, Missouri and Kansas. By year’s end, Mount Sinai Medical Center plans to open Manhattan’s first such facility.

“We’re going to have an increase in people over the age of 65 who are going to take their medical problems with them to hospital emergency departments,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “The fact that we’re really preparing for that wave, I think, is important.”


The drive to build senior E.R.’s is motivated in part by hospitals’ desire to find an edge in the increasingly competitive health care marketplace.
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Rescue Breathing May Not Be Needed for Adult CPR

Image via WikipediaBy Todd Neale, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

For adult patients who have suffered an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, rescue breathing may not be a crucial component of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) delivered by a bystander, a meta-analysis showed.

"Our findings support the idea that emergency medical services dispatch should instruct bystanders to focus on chest-compression-only CPR in adults with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest," Nagele and his colleagues wrote. "However, whether chest-compression-only CPR should be recommended for unassisted lay bystander CPR is unclear."
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Some Older ER Patients Are Getting The Wrong Medicines

(Medical News Today) A University of Michigan study recently published in Academic Emergency Medicine says that it is common for patients 65 and older to receive potentially inappropriate medications when treated in an emergency room.

Nearly 19.5 million older patients, or 16.8 percent of eligible emergency visits from 2000-2006, received one or more potentially inappropriate medications - or PIMs. The large sample of approximately 470,000 ED and outpatient clinic visits, corresponding to a national estimate of about 1.5 billion total visits, allowed the researchers to determine the extent of the problem nationwide.

"There are certain medications that probably are not good to give to older adults because the potential benefits are outweighed by potential problems," says lead author, William J. Meurer, M.D., M.S., assistant professor, U-M Departments of Emergency Medicine and Neurology.
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'Invisible bracelet' for emergency health alerts? - Boston.com

By Lauran Neergaard, AP Medical Writer

Emergency health alerts for the Facebook generation? The nation's ambulance crews are pushing a virtual medical ID system to rapidly learn a patient's health history during a crisis -- and which can immediately text-message loved ones that the person is headed for a hospital.

The Web-based registry, invisibleBracelet.org, started in Oklahoma and got a boost this fall when the state's government made the program an optional health benefit for its own employees.

Now the Invisible Bracelet attempts to go nationwide as the American Ambulance Association next month begins training its medics, who in turn will urge people in their communities to sign up.
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