profession
Emergency doctors see many patients, frequent interruptions
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted Feb. 14, 2011
Emergency physicians treat five or six patients at a time and spend most of their time reviewing charts, interpreting tests and performing other care activities that do not involve direct contact with patients, according to a study published online Jan. 28 in the Annals of Emergency Medicine (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21276642/).
Researchers shadowed 85 emergency physicians at two academic medical centers and two community hospitals for two-hour periods, recording how they spent their time. The physicians spent about an hour on indirect care activities and about a half hour directly interacting with patients. The study found that the doctors were interrupted frequently, with emergency physicians in academic settings interrupted twice as often as their counterparts in community hospitals.
Emergency departments should be redesigned to minimize interruptions, make communications more efficient and increase the time physicians spend with patients, the authors said.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/02/14/prbf0214.htm.
