Washington, DC - The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) today said the University of Chicago Medical Center is failing in its obligation to treat emergency patients, citing drastic reductions in inpatient beds for emergency patients and a recent news story about a 12-year-old boy attacked by a pit bull who was sent to another hospital for surgery. With hospital plans in place to reduce staffing and beds for emergency care even further, the chair of medicine and the chief of emergency medicine at the medical center have resigned.

ACEP expressed grave concerns that the University of Chicago’s policy toward emergency patients is dangerously close to “patient dumping,” a practice made illegal by the Emergency Medical Labor and Treatment Act (EMTALA), and reflected an effort to “cherry pick” wealthy patients over poor.

“The medical center is reducing emergency care access to its local community, while at the same time, opening a ‘side door’ to a ‘specialty intake area’ to provide emergency care to medical center private patients,” said
Dr. Nick Jouriles, president of ACEP. “This is a dangerous precedent that could have catastrophic effects in poor neighborhoods across the country. Congress needs to hold hearings about the problems facing emergency patients. If other community, non-profit hospitals follow this example and shift the lion’s share of resources to its high-revenue elective patients and procedures, it will leave many emergency patients virtually out in the cold. The University of Chicago Medical Center is located in a poor neighborhood whose residents have few, if any, other options for emergency care.”

The boy in the news - Dontae Adams - is a Medicaid patient who the hospital treated with painkillers and a tetanus shot but then refused to admit him for surgery. His mother took him on an hour-long bus ride to another hospital that admitted him and performed the face-saving surgery.

Dr. Jouriles took issue with a statement made by medical center spokesperson John Easton that “sending Dontae into surgery too quickly would have created a risk for infection.”

“As a physician who has treated hundreds of animal injuries, I know of no reason why early surgical intervention would increase infection risk,” said Dr. Jouriles.

In addition, Dr. Jouriles took issue with statements made by the hospital that the Urban Health Initiative is helping patients with non-urgent care find medical homes and that the issue was about patients with non-urgent medical conditions.

“There simply are no other health care providers willing to care for most of these patients,” said Dr. Jouriles. “Many primary care providers are simply not taking Medicare patients, let alone the uninsured or the underinsured. Most clinics don’t have same-day laboratory or X-ray resources needed to determine whether patients have emergency medical conditions. This is an abdication of the hospital’s obligation to provide care to its community and a fundamental assault on the safety net that emergency departments are intended to provide. The University of Chicago Medical Center is receiving considerable tax benefits as a non-profit hospital, with the expectation that it will provide care to its community. If other community hospitals follow suit, it will be catastrophic for the growing ranks of the poor, uninsured and underinsured, especially during this financial crisis. Access to lifesaving emergency care for all Americans is threatened.”

According to reliable sources at the University of Chicago Medical Center, the emergency department has one of the highest rates of emergency patients leaving without being seen [10 – 15 percent with prolonged waits of more than 14 hours up to three days for an inpatient bed] and one of the highest ambulance diversion rates in Illinois. The plans being made are another step in making sure people in the local community have no access to emergency care. Only 12.1 percent of emergency patients are categorized as “non-urgent” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“While we recognize that tough economic times demand sacrifices by everyone, the latest moves by the university unfairly distribute the burden to the poorest members of the community it serves,” said Dr. Jouriles. “If anything, these are times that demand the most from our hospitals and our emergency departments, because these are the times when our patients need more care, not less. My heart breaks for Ms. Adams and Dontae and the night of hell they surely endured just to get Dontae the care he needed and deserved. This should not happen to another family in America ever again. And Dontae Adams had medical insurance! Imagine this story playing out with patients in other communities who have no health insurance, a segment of the population that grows every day as more and more people lose their jobs.”

ACEP is a national medical specialty society representing emergency medicine. ACEP is committed to advancing emergency care through continuing education, research and public education. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, ACEP has 53 chapters representing each state, as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. A Government Services Chapter represents emergency physicians employed by military branches and other government agencies.

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