Medical Care for People in my Age Category

First of all there is one thing for sure about the elderly, in an article I read this means people over 65, and it is simply that there will be more of us as baby boomers continue to age. Although changes are coming in healthcare there have been a lot of assurances in the news that Medicare is not changing so the elderly should stop fearing that.

The info I am sharing is about a study that was done in the United Kingdom about Accident and Emergency Services provided by hospitals. To sum up the study, if a study could talk, it says this. Know how you hate to be sitting for hours waiting to see a doctor? Often times the Emergency Walk-In Clinics aren't much better especially for first-timers filling out all that paperwork. In the study, it was found that In the UK nearly a quarter (25%) were people over the age of 65. To complicate the problem further, most of the elderly patients had issues or complexities that were too difficult to “sew up”, “put a Band-Aid on”, or “prescribe two aspirin and call me in the morning.” As a result, elderly patients were often admitted to the hospital and then forced to wait at least two days to see a geriatrician who could properly identify their problems and treat them.  As a result of this, beds were used up, frequently unnecessarily, time was wasted, and valuable hospital resources and patient’s time exacerbated. By adding a geriatric team linked to a community team to follow-up on patients after they were discharged, the number of patients over 70 years old discharged the same day from the Emergency rooms/hospitals at the Royal Free Hospital in London increased by 38 percent.  In many cases, a geriatrician did nothing more than prescribe medication changes or arrange for social care. It also freed up staff to process the other admissions; resulting in reduced waiting times. Freeing up beds and relocating services such as diagnostics to where they were most needed improved overall efficiency and allocation of available assets. In other words, it saved time and money.

One would also think to consider segregating emergency rooms in such a way to not only treat the elderly but also a section for children, hospitals overall might realize even greater savings and reduce patient waiting even more. With the costs of medical treatment already skyrocketing, saving a few bucks and some time is not a bad idea, just an interesting idea.