SGEM Xtra: Right, You’re Bloody Well Right, You’ve got the Bloody Right to Care

Date: January 27th, 2020 Guest Skeptics: Dr. Richelle Cooper is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Maia Dorsett is an Emergency and EMS Physician at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Reference: Dorsett et al. Bringing value, balance and humanity to the emergency department: The Right Care Top 10 for emergency medicine. Emerg Med J 2019 This is an SGEM Xtra based on a recent publication by Dr. Dorsett and her team. It is an article of ten recommendations on how we might provide a more balanced approach to healthcare tailored to the needs of the patients we see in the emergency department. One of the authors of the article was the Legend of Emergency Medicine, Dr. J. Hoffman. SGEMers have heard about over-testing, over-diagnosing and over-treating. These authors have some concerns about what they call the unmentioned “elephant in the room“. “While specialty societies do undertake advocacy work to address the health needs of the public, they also have a fundamental duty to advocate for and protect the interests of their specialty. Furthermore, healthcare dollars that are ‘wasted’ are of course not actually thrown away but rather end up in someone’s pocket; thus, there is clearly a conflict of interest when specialty societies address the overuse of extremely lucrative medical procedures that provide substantial income to their members.” Choosing Wisely is an initiative trying to address the issue of over-testing, over-diagnosing and over-treating. To be clear, these authors are not against Choosing Wisely. “Important to note that we are not against choosing wisely, however the issue is larger and more nuanced. It is not just about “low value” care and costs but about harms, harms from overuse of diagnostic tests and treatment and also from underuse in other cases. The right care alliance is concerned about the right care for the right patients at the right time, thus not just overused tests.” The organization this group of authors are associated with is called the Right Care Alliance (RCA). How is it different from the Choosing Wisely Campaign? “The Right Care Alliance was formed in 2015 by the Lown Institute, a healthcare think tank. Many of us, such as myself, became involved with the work of the Lown because of our interest in reducing the harms of overtesting and overdiagnosis. But we quickly realized that talking about Right Care was actually a conversation about the Right amount of care and that this was more than just about too much care, it was also about underuse, health care access and a focus on treating the whole patient. It was this realization – that we cannot address overuse without talking about underuse – that lead to the formation of the RCA. The powerful part of the RCA is that it is a grassroots coalition of not just healthcare practitioners, but also patients and community members.” Where does emergency medicine fit into the RCA initiative? “Nowhere in healthcare is the unfortunate dichotomy between overuse and underuse as apparent as in our emergency departments, which function simultaneously as centers of high acuity healthcare and healthcare safety nets. Organizationally, the RCA has a number of subcommittees or “councils”. The Emergency Medicine (EM) Council is one of these subgroups and is composed primarily of emergency physicians and nurses.” “In May 2016, the RCA asked its specialty councils to create their own ‘top ...