With over-the-top crowding and longer-than-ever wait times in emergency departments across Canada, a number of DalEM physicians have taken the lead in publicly expressing their thoughts about the problem and how to solve it.
Dr. Paul Atkinson, Head of DalEM Saint John, helped crystallize the key issues and galvanize professional, media and public interest in the topic with an editorial in the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine (CJEM), published in early 2022. Written with colleagues Dr. Grant Innes and Dr. Ken McGeorge, this editorial attracted intense attention, becoming CJEM’s #1 article of 2022. It generated ten stories in the news media, four blogs and 526 individual references, putting it in the top 5 per cent of all research output ever tracked by Altmetrics, the UK-based data science company that tracks where published research is mentioned online.
Dr. Paul Atkinson, Head of DalEM Saint John, NB.
Go here to look at the editorial in its entirety.
In 2023, Paul was quoted and mentioned in CBC and CTV coverage of the crisis in Canadian EDs, pointing to the fact that no amount of change in how EDs operate will solve the problems caused by lack of access to timely primary care, urgent care, acute care beds, post-op follow-up care, and specialist care. He called for much broader system-wide changes, with emergency physicians leading the way with a willingness to address everything possible within the sphere of emergency medicine’s influence. Check the links below for the complete coverage:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/er-crowding-summer-1.6905916