Good Night Pediatrics Offers Alternative to ER for Children at Night

Our nation’s emergency rooms have become seriously overloaded.  The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that in 2006 there were 119.2 million visits to hospital emergency rooms.  Emergency room visits accounted for eleven per cent of all outpatient care visits.  Only sixteen per cent of visits to emergency rooms were classified as emergencies.  Thirty-seven per cent were classified as urgent and twenty-two per cent were semi-urgent.

Infants under twelve months of age made the highest number of emergency room visits per capita.  Three quarters of these visits were to general emergency rooms, nine per cent to pediatric emergency rooms and fourteen percent to emergency rooms in pediatric hospitals.  The most common reasons for children to visit the emergency room were fever, cough, vomiting, earache and injury to the head, neck, or face.  Seventy-two percent of the visits by children occurred after 5 P.M. or on the weekend.

Emergency room care is evaluated by the American College of Emergency Physicians, the professional organization of emergency room doctors.  Evaluation is done on a state-by-state basis.  In 2008 Arizona ranked 45^th overall and received a grade of D+ for its emergency room care.  (The average grade for the country was (C-.)  Arizona ranked 48^th in Access to Emergency Care (F), 29^th in Quality and Patient Safety Environment (C), 48^th in Medical Liability Environment (F), 40^th in Public Health and Injury Prevention (D-), and 9^th in Disaster Preparedness (A-).

According to an article in the Arizona Capitol Times, Press Ganey Associates found that the average emergency room wait time in Arizona is five hours and twenty-seven minutes, one of the longest in the country.  Arizona has only seven emergency rooms per one million people.  The national average is twenty per one million people.

Our emergency rooms in Arizona are overcrowded and have very long wait times.  Most of the visits are not for medical emergencies.  Although infants and children are significant users of emergency room services, only twenty-three per cent of the visits were to a pediatric emergency room.  Most of the visits were to general emergency rooms, where the physicians may not have been trained in caring for children.  Most of the visits by children were for problems that did not require an emergency room for evaluation and treatment.

Is there a better alternative than going to an emergency room if your child is sick at night?  Fortunately, if you live in the Valley of the Sun, the answer is yes.

Good Night Pediatrics provides urgent care to children under age nineteen every night of the year from 5 P.M. to 5 A.M.  We can treat almost any medical problem except the most severe or life-threatening.  Every one of our doctors is a pediatrician, trained to care for children.  We have both a laboratory and an X-ray machine at all our clinics.

Good Night Pediatrics is especially appropriate for care of breathing problems, fever, cough, ear pain, vomiting, diarrhea, minor to moderate injuries, sore throats and rashes. We can splint uncomplicated bone fractures and suture uncomplicated lacerations.

Good Night Pediatrics does not have the long waits common in the emergency room.  Most of the year it takes only about one hour from the time the child arrives until the child departs.  In the winter this period may increase but is always substantially shorter than the long waits in the emergency room in the winter.  Generally our wait time is about one-fifth of that in the emergency room.

Good Night Pediatrics works together with your child’s primary care physician.  We fax a copy of our medical note to your primary physician so your physician can deliver appropriate follow-up care.

Good Night Pediatrics accepts almost all insurance plans and our copayments are usually substantially less than for an emergency room visit.

Good Night Pediatrics has four convenient locations in the Southwest Valley, Northwest Valley, South Phoenix and Gilbert. For more information, visit http://www.goodnightpeds.com.

Guest article was written by Harvey J. Simon, M.D., the Chief Medical Director of Good Night Pediatrics.

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