What Not To Say in the Emergency Room

By Carol Levy

Many years ago, I was a clerk in an emergency room ward. Often the people who came in didn't seem to understand how an emergency room works. Unfortunately, those same misunderstandings exist today.

I have seen a number of online posts and comments by chronic pain patients about their experiences in emergency rooms. The posts tend to be very negative about ERs, often angry, and full of frustration over the way they were treated.

My intention when I started this column was to write about the emergency room experience, and what to expect when you make the choice to go there. I did some research to ensure my facts would still be current, such as how ER departments are configured today.

I found several articles on what not to say to your pain management doctor. To my surprise, the answers mimicked what you should not say in the ER, such as “I just need painkillers” or “I know what I need, just prescribe it.”

Saying that gives the impression that you’re just looking for medication, rather than treatment. It’s not advisable to say that to any doctor, regardless of the situation.  

At the ER, you will first see the receptionist or ward clerk. The next step for most hospitals is the triage person, usually a nurse.  When they ask “What is the reason for your visit?” saying, “I have pain” is not sufficient.

They will inquire about when, where and for how long you’ve had pain, to get a better idea of why you are there. That will help them decide what level of an emergency you are.

It’s important not to expect ER staff to know everything about rare disorders, such as CRPS, trigeminal neuralgia or Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. The chances they have seen or even heard of them are slim. Unfortunately, for many rare disorders, we have to be the ones to educate the staff.

Even if you are in extreme pain, shouting “I have pain!” will not help get what you need. Calmly explaining, as best you can, the cause and level of your pain gives them a better understanding of why you are there, and will help get you seen sooner.

Another “don’t” is asking for a specific opioid, as it can make you appear to be a drug seeker. That’s not fair, I know, but that’s just the way it is in the current anti- opioid environment.

Exaggerating your pain can also be seen as the behavior of someone looking to get drugs. Screaming or yelling “I am in horrible pain! Give me something now!” won't get you what you need. Ultimately, the doctor or nurse will decide if you're exaggerating your pain. If they decide that’s the case, you may get nothing at all.

You also shouldn’t question your doctor's expertise. After all, he is the expert (or at least thinks he is). Asking for clarification is fine, but asking for a second opinion may backfire. It’s another way of saying you don't trust or have faith in the doctor. In the ER, you won't be able to get a second opinion. Whichever doctor sees you is the one you’re stuck with.

The wait in the ER may be a long one. The doctors and nurses may seem to be walking around aimlessly, but they may actually be busy, dealing with patients who have suffered a heart attack, stroke, or severe trauma.

If you are a chronic pain patient, your pain may not be seen as an immediate concern. To ER staff, acute pain could be a sign of a life threatening situation that needs immediate attention.

Many ERs now have private rooms, but some still have ward-like areas. It is nice to have privacy, but they may put you in the ward area because that is the only space available.

These unwritten rules apply to everyone on how to act in the ER. But for those of us with chronic pain, we need to to be extra careful about what lines not to cross.

What lessons have you learned in the ER?

Carol Jay Levy has lived with trigeminal neuralgia, a chronic facial pain disorder, for over 30 years. She is the author of “A Pained Life, A Chronic Pain Journey.”  Carol is the moderator of the Facebook support group “Women in Pain Awareness.” Her blog “The Pained Life” can be found here. 

Seniors Often Left Stranded in Emergency Rooms

By Judith Graham, KFF Health News

Every day, the scene plays out in hospitals across America: Older men and women lie on gurneys in emergency room corridors moaning or suffering silently as harried medical staff attend to crises.

Even when physicians determine these patients need to be admitted to the hospital, they often wait for hours — sometimes more than a day — in the ER in pain and discomfort, not getting enough food or water, not moving around, not being helped to the bathroom, and not getting the kind of care doctors deem necessary.

“You walk through ER hallways, and they’re lined from end to end with patients on stretchers in various states of distress calling out for help, including a number of older patients,” said Hashem Zikry, an emergency medicine physician at UCLA Health.

Physicians who staff emergency rooms say this problem, known as ER boarding, is as bad as it’s ever been — even worse than during the first years of the covid-19 pandemic, when hospitals filled with desperately ill patients.

While boarding can happen to all ER patients, adults 65 and older, who account for nearly 20% of ER visits, are especially vulnerable during long waits for care. Also, seniors may encounter boarding more often than other patients.

The best estimates I could find, published in 2019, before the covid-19 pandemic, suggest that 10% of patients were boarded in ERs before receiving hospital care. About 30% to 50% of these patients were older adults.

“It’s a public health crisis,” said Aisha Terry, an associate professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences and the president of the board of the American College of Emergency Physicians, which sponsored a summit on boarding in September.

What’s going on? I spoke to almost a dozen doctors and researchers who described the chaotic situation in ERs. They told me staff shortages in hospitals, which affect the number of beds available, are contributing to the crisis. Also, they explained, hospital administrators are setting aside more beds for patients undergoing lucrative surgeries and other procedures, contributing to bottlenecks in ERs and leaving more patients in limbo.

Then, there’s high demand for hospital services, fueled in part by the aging of the U.S. population, and backlogs in discharging patients because of growing problems securing home health care and nursing home care, according to Arjun Venkatesh, chair of emergency medicine at the Yale School of Medicine.

Long Waits Risky for Seniors

The impact of long ER waits on seniors who are frail, with multiple medical issues, is especially serious. Confined to stretchers, gurneys, or even hard chairs, often without dependable aid from nurses, they’re at risk of losing strength, forgoing essential medications, and experiencing complications such as delirium, according to Saket Saxena, a co-director of the geriatric emergency department at the Cleveland Clinic.

When these patients finally secure a hospital bed, their stays are longer and medical complications more common. And new research finds that the risk of dying in the hospital is significantly higher for older adults when they stay in ERs overnight, as is the risk of adverse events such as falls, infections, bleeding, heart attacks, strokes, and bedsores.

Ellen Danto-Nocton, a geriatrician in Milwaukee, was deeply concerned when an 88-year-old relative with “strokelike symptoms” spent two days in the ER a few years ago. Delirious, immobile, and unable to sleep as alarms outside his bed rang nonstop, the older man spiraled downward before he was moved to a hospital room. “He really needed to be in a less chaotic environment,” Danto-Nocton said.

Several weeks ago, Zikry of UCLA Health helped care for a 70-year-old woman who’d fallen and broken her hip while attending a basketball game.

“She was in a corner of our ER for about 16 hours in an immense amount of pain that was very difficult to treat adequately,” he said. ERs are designed to handle crises and stabilize patients, not to “take care of patients who we’ve already decided need to be admitted to the hospital,” he said.

How common is ER boarding and where is it most acute? No one knows, because hospitals aren’t required to report data about boarding publicly. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services retired a measure of boarding in 2021. New national measures of emergency care capacity have been proposed but not yet approved.

“It’s not just the extent of ED boarding that we need to understand. It’s the extent of acute hospital capacity in our communities,” said Venkatesh of Yale, who helped draft the new measures.

In the meantime, some hospital systems are publicizing their plight by highlighting capacity constraints and the need for more hospital beds. Among them is Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, which announced in January that ER boarding had risen 32% from October 2022 to September 2023. At the end of that period, patients admitted to the hospital spent a median of 14 hours in the ER and 26% spent more than 24 hours.

Maura Kennedy, Mass General’s chief of geriatric emergency medicine, described an 80-something woman with a respiratory infection who languished in the ER for more than 24 hours after physicians decided she needed inpatient hospital care.

“She wasn’t mobilized, she had nothing to cognitively engage her, she hadn’t eaten, and she became increasingly agitated, trying to get off the stretcher and arguing with staff,” Kennedy told me. “After a prolonged hospital stay, she left the hospital more disabled than she was when she came in.”

What Seniors Can Do

When I asked ER doctors what older adults could do about these problems, they said boarding is a health system issue that needs health system and policy changes. Still, they had several suggestions.

“Have another person there with you to advocate on your behalf,” said Jesse Pines, chief of clinical innovation at US Acute Care Solutions, the nation’s largest physician-owned emergency medicine practice. And have that person speak up if they feel you’re getting worse or if staffers are missing problems.

Alexander Janke, a clinical instructor of emergency medicine at the University of Michigan, advises people, “Be prepared to wait when you come to an ER” and “bring a medication list and your medications, if you can.”

To stay oriented and reduce the possibility of delirium, “make sure you have your hearing aids and eyeglasses with you,” said Michael Malone, medical director of senior services for Advocate Aurora Health, a 20-hospital system in Wisconsin and northern Illinois. “Whenever possible, try to get up and move around.”

Friends or family caregivers who accompany older adults to the ER should ask to be at their bedside, when possible, and “try to make sure they eat, drink, get to the bathroom, and take routine medications for underlying medical conditions,” Malone said.

Older adults or caregivers who are helping them should try to bring “things that would engage you cognitively: magazines, books … music, anything that you might focus on in a hallway where there isn’t a TV to entertain you,” Kennedy said.

“Experienced patients often show up with eye masks and ear plugs” to help them rest in ERs with nonstop stimulation, said Zikry of UCLA. “Also, bring something to eat and drink in case you can’t get to the cafeteria or it’s a while before staffers bring these to you.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues.

ER Patients Less Likely to Use Opioids Long Term

By Pat Anson, Editor

Patients who are prescribed opioid pain medication for the first time in hospital emergency rooms are less likely to become long term opioid users than patients in other settings, according to a large new study by researchers at the Mayo Clinic.

"Our paper lays to rest the notion that emergency physicians are handing out opioids like candy," said lead author Molly Moore Jeffery, PhD, scientific director of the Mayo Clinic Division of Emergency Medicine Research. “Most opioid prescriptions written in the emergency department are for shorter duration, written for lower daily doses and less likely to be for long-acting formulations."

Jeffrey and her colleagues analyzed data for 5.2 million opioid prescriptions filled in emergency rooms from 2009 to 2015.

They found that only 1.1% percent of “opioid naïve” patients with private insurance progressed to long term opioid use. That compares to 2% of patients in non-emergency settings. Long term use was defined as someone getting 10 or more refills or more than a 120 day supply of opioids in a year.

About 3 percent of Medicare beneficiaries used opioids long term after getting them in an ER, with disabled Medicare patients the most likely ER patients to progress to long term use (13.4%).

Only 3.3% of opioid doses for privately insured patients in the ER exceeded 90mg morphine equivalent units (what the CDC considers a high daily dose). That compares to 7.2% of doses in non-emergency settings.  The duration of prescriptions was also lower for ER patients.

"Less than 5 percent of opioid prescriptions from the ER exceeded 7 days, which is much lower than the percentage in non-emergency settings. Further research should explore how we can replicate the success of opioid prescribing in emergency departments in other medical settings," said Jeffery, whose study is published online in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

The use of opioid medication in hospital emergency rooms has become a contentious issue for both patients and physicians, with many patients complaining that they are profiled and labeled as drug seekers when they seek treatment at an ER for pain.

“I refuse to go to the ER for pain. Unless I feel I'm absolutely dying, I will not go. It isn't worth being made to feel like I'm only ‘putting on a show’ or I'm a junkie just trying to get high,” one pain sufferer told us.

In a survey of over 1,250 pain patients last year by PNN and the International Pain Foundation, 80 percent said they had felt labeled as an addict or drug seeker by hospital staff. Asked if doctors were reluctant to prescribe opioid medication while they were hospitalized, over two-thirds said it happens often or sometimes. To see the complete survey results, click here.

“I had a doctor in an emergency room situation one time during an episode I was having, who actually stood in the open doorway of my room, I was still in the ER, and yelled at me as loud as he could, that he wasn't giving me any pain medicine,” said one patient.

Some hospitals, such as Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, have adopted guidelines that discourage opioid prescribing to ER patients. The voluntary policy quickly won broad support from Temple’s physicians.

In a survey by the hospital, only 13% of Temple’s ER doctors thought patients with legitimate reasons for opioids were denied appropriate care. A large majority – 84% of the doctors -- did not believe patients were denied appropriate pain relief.

“Emergency physicians have identified themselves as targets for patients who seek opioids for nonmedical purposes, yet it can be difficult for clinicians to distinguish drug seeking behavior from legitimate need,” said Daniel del Portal, MD, Assistant Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University.