A study claims that the risk of dying is 46% higher for patients over 75 who spend a night in the emergency room on a stretcher. The figure is all the more striking as many emergency services are now saturated.
This is a frequent scene today in the spans of French health establishments. The saturation of the country’s health services frequently leads emergency rooms to leave some patients on stretchers before they are seen by a doctor. The risks are particularly significant today for the elderly.
A cohort study, conducted among 97 emergency services in the country, thus affirms that the risk of dying in the emergency room is 46% higher for patients over 75 who spend the night on a stretcher. This work has not been validated by any scientific journal whatsoever, but it was nevertheless presented at the Congress of emergency physicians which was held this Thursday, June 8. Our colleagues from France Inter were able to consult the results of this study.
“Impressive” results
The observation is all the more striking as the French emergency services have recently been confronted with a triple epidemic (bronchiolitis, influenza, Covid-19). The researchers looked at the cases of some 1,598 patients over the age of 75. 891 patients were able to have a bed before midnight on the day of their arrival at the hospital. The other 707 patients who were part of the cohort had to spend the night on a stretcher.
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“The results are impressive, evokes Yonathan Freund, emergency doctor in Paris, at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, and one of the main contributors to the study, with our colleagues from France Inter. The excess mortality is 46 %, almost 50% therefore, if you spent a night on a stretcher in the emergency room. Worse, he explains, if we are more particularly interested in elderly patients who have limited autonomy, and therefore even more fragile, these patients there die almost twice as many if they spend a night on a stretcher rather than in a conventional hospital bed.”
This study also indicates that from December 1 to 31, 2022, 31 people died alone, on stretchers in the emergency room corridors. “If we were exhaustive, we could consider that there are many more”, comments for his part Yonathan Freund.