In a recent post, Dan Smith (aka Farmer Dan) stated that 85% of patients visiting the Palm Drive Emergency Room in 2013 actually required an emergency room rather than urgent care. The Foundation used exactly the same statistics in its public presentation last week in Sebastopol. According to both, Palm Drive ER visits were rated either "high acuity," requiring an emergency room, or "low acuity," requiring urgent care or less.
But this is simply wrong. Palm Drive Hospital didn't use a high/low acuity rating system--it used a 5-tier rating system, and only the top tier was used for "life threatening" cases that truly required an emergency room.
And in both 2012 and 2013, only 13% of visits were rated in this "life threatening" category.
The raw OSHPD data for 2013 is daunting (see link below for the full 2013 data set). Fortunately, Sonoma County has assembled a user-friendly summary for 2012. In 2012, just like 2013, the "life threatening" cases were about 13% of the total visits to the Palm Drive ER. Here's the link to the relevant page of that document (scroll down to the bottom of that page for ER statistics).
Let's be clear--I'm not minimizing the importance of those cases that truly require an emergency room. That's why I support reopening Palm Drive if it's fiscally responsible and sustainable. But we need to see the facts clearly, not distort the facts to support a particular viewpoint. If we can't reopen Palm Drive as an acute care hospital with an ER (a Herculean task, as everyone acknowledges ), then we need to understand our options to create the best health care services we can for all of West County.
The full OSHPD data set for 2013 can be found here (https://www.oshpd.ca.gov/hid/Product...ata_FINAL.xlsx) for the data lovers out there.
And here's a link to the full Sonoma County 2012 document.