[Press release] Thousands Sent to Emergency Room by Preventable Pool Chemical Injuries

From the 15 May 2014 CDC press release

Children often the ones hurt by pool chemicals

Injuries from pool chemicals led to nearly 5,000 emergency room visits in 2012, according to a study released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nearly half of these preventable injuries were in children and teenagers and more than a third occurred at a home. Pool chemical injuries were most common during the summer swim season, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and almost half occurred on weekends.

“Chemicals are added to the water in pools to stop germs from spreading. But they need to be handled and stored safely to avoid serious injuries,” said Michele Hlavsa, chief of CDC’s Healthy Swimming Program.

Residential pool owners and public pool operators can follow these simple and effective steps to prevent pool chemical injuries:

• Read and follow directions on product labels.
• Wear appropriate safety equipment, such as goggles and masks, as directed, when handling pool chemicals.
• Secure pool chemicals to protect people and animals.
• Keep young children away when handling chemicals.
• NEVER mix different pool chemicals with each other, especially chlorine products with acid.
• Pre-dissolve pool chemicals ONLY when directed by product label.
• Add pool chemical to water, NEVER water to pool chemicals.

The study analyzed data from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS). NEISS captures data on injuries related to consumer products from about 100 hospital emergency departments nationwide. The NEISS data can then be used to calculate national estimates.

May 19–25, 2014 is Recreational Water Illness and Injury (RWII) Prevention Week. The theme for RWII Prevention Week 2014 is Healthy and Safe Swimming: We’re in it Together. It focuses on the role of swimmers, aquatics and beach staff, residential pool owners, and public health officials in preventing drowning, pool chemical injuries, and outbreaks of illnesses.

Chlorine and bromine do not kill germs instantly; most are killed within minutes. So it is important that everyone help keep germs out of the water in the first place by not swimming when ill with diarrhea and taking kids on bathroom breaks. Protect yourself by not swallowing pool water.

For more information about healthy swimming, visit www.cdc.gov/healthyswimming.

 

[Article] Hospitals find ways to navigate homeless into shelters

From the 6 November 2013 Los Angeles Daily News article

WOODLAND HILLS >> Almost once a week, Guadalupe Tolentino’s liver and bloodstream drown in liquor and sorrow, and that gets him a free ambulance ride to Kaiser Permanente’s Emergency Department.

There, doctors and nurses flush the alcohol out of the 55-year-old man’s veins with IV fluids, calm his tremors with vitamins and medications and, if he stays long enough, provide him a meal and clean clothes.

Despite an existence in crisis, liquor is never far from Tolentino’s mind, and neither is Kaiser’s emergency department in Woodland Hills, which he visits up to 40 times a year.

For Tolentino and other chronic homeless men and women like him, the emergency department is a place of stability and peace, where the sound of rushing crash carts and the beeps of telemetry monitors can be a lullaby compared to the sounds of sleeping on the streets.

But for the hospital’s “homeless navigator” Jonathan Lopez, those such as Tolentino, known as frequent flyers, also are never far from his mind. Most pose no harm, but those repeated returns show that their chronic drug or alcohol dependence as well as their homelessness go untreated. And it means the hospital pays an average of $1,500 a night for their stay, money that is never recuperated.

“When a frequent flyer returns to our ED my adrenalin gets going,” said Lopez, “I instantly start to process where I might be able to coordinate a placement,” Lopez said. “I get to relate to these individuals in an extraordinary way.”

Hospitals around the country have been increasingly using homeless navigators to help place indigent men and women into treatments centers or housing after discharge. In the Kaiser system, which has 14 medical centers in Southern California, Lopez’s position is part of a first-of-its-kind, two-year-old pilot program launched at the Woodland Hills campus. He said he crafted the program after watching a similar approach formed by the San Gabriel Valley Consortium on Homelessness.

…

Read the entire article here

 

The role of alcohol in health costs

This blog post brought to mind a dear friend of mine, deceased now about 8 years. She was staying at our house, basically to get out of an abusive relationship. She had a myriad of health problems…Once I came home and she was passed out. I thought it was one of her many medical conditions that was the main factor…and somehow with the help of neighbors got her in my car and we sped to the emergency room. To make a long story short, it turned out her blood alcohol was extremely high….I know now the alcoholism not only “translated” into high medical costs for her, but also a short life.
May she rest in peace, rest in peace….

From the 6 January 2012 post by EDMUND KWOK, MD at KevinMD.com

Defined as someone “having the faculties impaired by alcohol, those of us who work in an acute healthcare facility are witness to many illustrious examples of drunk patients coming through our doors.

 

Underaged kids passed out at a house party? Yup. Raging alcoholics who are brought into the ER at least once a week? Sure. Elderly women who secretly binges on wine at home and falls down the stairs repeatedly? You betcha. What they all have in common is an apparent complete oblivion/ignorance to the source of the problem, and the associated ill effects on themselves.

Sometimes I wonder if the healthcare/political/legal system itself is “drunk”, in its own oblivion and inaction towards the impact alcohol abuse is having on our society.

The average sober Canadian would be shocked to hear of the types of alcohol-related ER visits that come through a hospital’s doors every weekend.

Empirical data supports this theory of absurd and inefficient healthcare dollar usage on alcohol abuse related hospital visits. As reported in the Recommendations for a National Alcohol Strategy published in 2007, “the economic impact of alcohol-related harm in Canada totaled $14.6B, taking into account the costs associated with lost productivity, health care, and enforcement. This amount is slightly less than the estimated cost of tobacco at $17B, but nearly double the cost attributed to illegal drugs at $8.2B”.

Anecdotal evidence reports many unnecessary ER visits where drunk patients simply take up an acute care bed for the night to sober up, eat a free breakfast in the morning and then get discharged. It is estimated that 0.6% of all U.S. ER visits are made by people who have no other problems beside being drunk, translating to over 900 million dollars just for ER visits alone….

 

 

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