Emergency Room

The subject of The Shadow Saver is an emergency-room physician, but don't go to the Independent Eye production expecting to see scene after dramatic scene of urgent activity as doctors and nurses work intently on wounded and injured patients. In other words, this is not the television show ER transferred to the stage. Oh, there will be a man, or rather a puppet, with a screwdriver stuck in his chest, but that will be the exception. According to Conrad Bishop, co- writer of The Shadow Saver, "there is not a lot of instantaneous high drama" in the piece.

Henry English, a young boy who had just stepped on a nail, got out of his aunt's station wagon and started to limp toward the emergency entrance at Giuffre Medical Center. "I hope you're not bringing him over here," a security guard called to Henry's aunt, Joyce English, who had rushed the boy from the family's home on Perth Street near Broad. "The emergency room's closed. " "But this is the closest emergency room," Joyce English protested. "Take him to St. Joe's," the security guard said.

With many doctors' offices closed in New Jersey this week to protest soaring liability-insurance bills, hundreds of sick people have flocked to hospital emergency rooms for routine care. Will patients, who were turned away by their own physicians, end up shelling out more money for medical insurance co-payments because they sought treatment in an emergency room and not a physician's office? Probably, yes. Patients may not get the co-payment bill due for their emergency room visit for a few weeks, but the co-pay for a hospital emergency room visit typically runs more than a doctor's office visit - $10 to $40 more, depending on the health insurer and the health plan.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health yesterday permitted the James C. Giuffre Medical Center to reopen its emergency room, effectively ending a 15- day-old ban on patient admissions at the hospital. The state, however, continued to restrict the number of medical/surgical patients at the North Philadelphia hospital to 80. The facility, at Eighth Street and Girard Avenue, has the capacity for 148 medical/surgical patients. Bruce Reimer, a Health Department spokesman, said the emergency room was allowed to reopen "because our staff is pleased with the continuing progress made at the facility over the past week.

A Harrisburg-based health insurance company - HealthAmerica and HealthAssurance Pennsylvania Inc. - has reached an agreement with the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office over complaints that it improperly rejected emergency-room treatment claims from more than 600 subscribers across the state, the Attorney General's Office said yesterday. HealthAmerica agreed to reprocess and pay $445,981 in claims. Most of that money will go to hospitals and doctors whose bills were rejected, said Nils Frederiksen, deputy press secretary for Attorney General Tom Corbett.

It wasn't quite a train wreck, but it was still a world of trouble. The emergency room at Episcopal Hospital in Kensington was about to get flooded with victims of bad heroin, and Becki Stuhlemmer knew it. And she knew she had to move fast. They needed more doctors. More nurses. More security, more hospital beds, more supplies. More everything. Stuhlemmer, Episcopal's admistrative director of emergency services, started calling other departments, mobilizing people throughout the hospital.

A financially troubled hospital group plans to consolidate some medical services and eliminate others in an effort to save millions in annual expenses. North Philadelphia Health System will shift all of its emergency-room and acute-care services to St. Joseph's Hospital at 16th and Girard. It will consolidate its growing substance-abuse and psychiatric programs at Girard Medical Center at Eighth and Girard, according to a plan released yesterday. The system employs about 1,300 people.

College boy Michael Bressler makes an important call home. "Mom, I got hit by a bus. " Naturally, his mother freaks. She doesn't understand that Michael's a lucky one, freshman at Penn, hit by a bus near Penn, whisked to the emergency room at Penn's hospital. He could be going to some country college, without the miracle factory at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Or, like many of his fellow patients, he could be so smashed up that he wouldn't be able to hold a phone or talk or even know who his mother was. The best show on television tonight is hiding at 10 on a cable outpost called the Learning Channel (look for TLC on your cable guide)

It's an oft-repeated scene. An ambulance arrives at a hospital emergency room carrying the victim of a traffic accident. The woman is unconscious and in need of immediate surgery for head injuries, and the staff quickly swings into action. But not much is said to the couple sitting anxiously in a corner of the waiting room. They are the parents of the victim, and they arrived 20 minutes after their child was brought in. In the bustle, they are overlooked by a medical staff busy with the task at hand.

Any day now, a bleeding, severely injured patient will be whisked into Lehigh Valley Hospital and enter not only the emergency room, but medical-research history. Unconscious and close to death, the patient will receive an experimental blood substitute that doctors hope will save many lives. Scientists have been trying for decades to develop artificial blood, until recently with little success. Now, Lehigh Valley has been chosen as the first hospital in the nation to administer such a product to a trauma patient - without the patient's consent.

The pain wall, veteran rowers call it. It hits every race if you're doing it right. It all looks pretty from the shore when an eight-oared shell gets in sync, but those rowers out there at the Dad Vail Regatta on Friday and Saturday are building lactic acid by the stroke, and eventually they lose the ability to clear it. They're at the pain wall, no way around it. "After that, you're just hanging on for dear life," said Temple men's coach Gavin...

IN THIS ERA of sky-high health-care costs and overbooked doctors, you don't need health insurance and you don't need an appointment at Temple ReadyCare on Roosevelt Boulevard, just south of Byberry Road. It's next door to Chickie's & Pete's, and it's just as walk-in friendly, which explains why more than 2,100 Northeast Philadelphia patients have walked into the nonemergency urgent-care facility since its New Year's Day opening. "We opened up just as flu season hit," said Dr. Steve Matta, who came from the Temple ReadyCare in Port Richmond to man the Northeast office.

Temple University Health System said it established an Institute for Population Health to put under one umbrella numerous existing efforts to move health care into the community.   Among the programs being moved to the institute is the training of community health workers, who work to reduce readmissions and unnecessary visits to the emergency room, said Paula Stillman, Temple vice president of health care services and director of the institute.   A second class of 30 community health workers is scheduled to start training in May. Another program is a Transition Center, which ensures that primary care physicians are notified when one of their patients comes to the ER or is admitted to the hospital, among other things, Stillman said.

IN THE documentary "The Waiting Room," a rookie physician gets advice on how to inform parents their teen son is dead of gunshot wounds: Tell them he didn't suffer while we were working on him, says the veteran. Don't tell them he's gone to "a better place. " Though, any place would seem to be better than the waiting room of this Oakland, Calif., clinic, ground zero for treating the uninsured and the sick. Standout moment: A man with kidney failure seeking dialysis has been bounced around so long he declares that he'd rather be dead than endure any more red tape, and we believe him. So does the treating physician, who watches, speechless, on the other side of any known protocol.

The Delaware County woman accused in the stabbing death of her husband, a former University of Pennsylvania basketball star, was being held in the medical section of the Delaware County Prison on Thursday awaiting psychiatric treatment, her attorney said. Maria Reyes Garcia-Pellon is accused of killing Matthew White early Monday as he slept. She told police she caught White viewing pornography, according to court records. On Sunday, White had taken his wife to the emergency room of an area hospital after she became extremely ill, according to Kathryn Labrum, her Media-based lawyer.

DEAR ABBY : I'm a 20-year-old college student with a great job, life ambitions and parents who love me. A few months ago I met a wonderful young man who is in the Army. We met on the Internet, communicated online for several weeks, then took the next step to meet in person. "Jack" is 10 years older than I am and has a son from a previous marriage. I did a background check and everything he told me is true. But I'm afraid to introduce him to my parents. They are leery about people meeting on the Internet.

When the patients get to Jeanmarie Perrone in the emergency room at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, they are sometimes already blue. Sometimes alive, but sometimes blue. Lack of oxygen will do that to a body. Overdoses of prescription opioid painkillers can cause depressed breathing, a lack of oxygen moving through the body, and then death. America has a continuing epidemic of such overdoses, with more than 15,000 deaths per year, government agencies say, more than from cocaine and heroin combined.

By Llewellyn King Here are 20 vital questions for New Year 2013. In every case, the answer is "probably not. " 1. Will the telephone companies, the credit-card issuers, and every other organization stop torturing their customers with automated phone systems that deny the right to speak to a human being? 2. Will President Obama tell us where he thinks the nation is going, and what it will look like in four years? 3. Will the tea-party folks finally get over tea and try something a little stronger, like head-clearing bourbon?

Question: I'm getting a dose of reality. I'm divorcing my husband (of 23 years) seven years after the affair and sitting unhappily on the fence. My sister has always been my best friend, with whom I could share it all ... but the blinders about reciprocity, support, and validation are slipping off. What kind of sister would hear stories of the packed getaway suitcase stashed in the garage in case of a needed escape and not say, "You need to get out...