Emergency Departments Prepare for Increased Summer Patient Volume

When most people think of the summer season, beaches and barbeques are the first things to come to mind. However, for emergency departments across the nation, summer is colloquially referred to as “ trauma season“. With daylight savings and students on summer break, days have become longer and summer leisure time increases. As a result, there is a rise in emergency department (ED) visits. This increase in patient volume is largely a result of injuries sustained through activities commonly enjoyed during the summer months. The activities that produce many of these injuries consist of bicycle riding, swimming, jumping on trampolines, and falling from structures like jungle gyms. Other sources of summertime emergency visits are: lawn mower accidents, ATV and dirt bike injuries, animal bites, and burns of various kinds. The prevalence of summertime ED visits means that some hospitals can see the number of traumatic injuries nearly double in the summer months. According to the Center for Disease Control, the summer season is responsible for 27 percent of the average year’s ED visits. Many of these summertime trips to the ED are for injuries sustained by children. On the other hand, there is also an increase in instances of traumatic injuries for adults. These injuries are typically severe sunburns, burns from grills or other sources of heat, and falls from ladders. Louis Alarcon, medical director of trauma at UPMC Presbyterian, said that cases of adult trauma can jump anywhere from 25 to 30 percent in the summer months. Despite the fact that patients in the United States visit emergency departments 120 million times per year, an astoundingly low four percent of the nation’s physicians specialize in emergency medicine. With hospitals and patients alike already experiencing the strain resulting from overcrowded emergency departments, a summertime increase in ED visits can further exhaust hospital’s limited resources. Hospitals that face increased patient volumes can look to locum tenens staffing solutions to increase their number of providers to match patient demand. Barton Associates and our team of locum tenens staffing experts provide an excellent solution to this seasonal increase in ED patient volume.