Emergency Room

Enrollees in an innovative Howard County health access plan for the uninsured visited emegency rooms and were admitted to hospitals much less than the national average last year, according to a report that is being cheered by supporters of the plan and questioned by critics. Figures for the Healthy Howard program were collected by David Holtgrave, chairman of the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and showed that in 2009, 8.5 percent of the roughly 515 Healthy Howard members studied made an emergency room visit and 2 percent were admitted to a hospital.

It was 42 years ago this week that the Franciscan Center opened its doors to anyone who needed a coat, a lunch or a sympathetic ear. The door at 101 W. 23 r d Street remains open to all, although the emergency outreach services offered at this way station of help are being fine-tuned to meet the needs of its clients. Earlier this year Edward F. McNally, an attorney and former Roman Catholic priest, became the center's executive director. He is part of the new administration team charged with guiding the center through a difficult economic time when many more clients are seeking emergency help.

Elizabeth Ann "Lizann" Donovan, a registered nurse whose career spanned more than 50 years, died Tuesday of multiple organ failure at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis. The Chestertown resident was 77. Elizabeth Ann Curtin, the daughter of a chemist and an educator, was born and raised in Syracuse, N.Y. She was a 1950 graduate of Most Holy Rosary High School in Syracuse and earned her nursing degree from the St. Joseph Hospital School of Nursing, also in Syracuse.

A Silver Spring woman has won a $2.35 million malpractice lawsuit against Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville after a misdiagnosis resulted in the amputation of several fingers, most of her right foot and left leg. Yesenia Rivera, 28, arrived at the hospital's emergency room in shock and complaining of severe abdominal pain on Aug. 3, 2006. She'd been diagnoses with kidney stones two days earlier and sent home, said Julia Arfaa, her attorney. Hospital staff, however, said they believed she had an ectopic pregnancy and did not treat the kidney problem until hours later.

In an ideal health care system, patients with non urgent complaints would not visit urgent centers. Yet the premise of the June 18th article "Hospitals try to improve emergency wait times" is that to solve our over-crowding problem in emergency rooms we need to streamline the care. But this solution addresses only the symptom and not the underlying disorder: too many patients with non-urgent illness seek care in urgent centers. Inappropriate use of the emergency room is a public health emergency.

In a broad effort to speed treatment of heart attack victims in Baltimore, five area hospitals are distributing hand-held devices to every paramedic unit in the city that can transmit patients' heart rhythms, or EKGs, to the hospital before they arrive. Doctors have 90 minutes to open an artery after someone shows symptoms of a serious heart attack before survival becomes far less assured. The hand-held units, which can send information straight to a cardiologist's smart phone, could speed up that treatment by as much as 15 minutes, research shows.

Robert James Lyden Sr., a longtime Baltimore County general practitioner who helped soothe jittery patients' nerves with Tootsie Roll pops, died Tuesday of cancer at his Rosedale home. He was 84. Dr. Lyden, the son of a tavern owner and a homemaker, was born and raised in Clarksburg, W.Va. After graduating in 1943 from St. Mary's High School in Clarksburg, he attended Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg for a year before enlisting in the Navy. He served as a hospital corpsman in the Pacific before being discharged in 1946.

Dr. William Dawson Lynn, a retired Baltimore surgeon and medical school professor who was an avid collector of flags, died March 2 at the Brightwood Center in Lutherville from complications of a fall. He was 91. Dr. Lynn, the son of a surgeon and a registered nurse, was born in Baltimore and spent his early years on Preston Street before moving to Rugby Road. Dr. Lynn's interest in medicine began early in his life. "He used to go to the hospital and watch his father operate and go on rounds," said a son, James Nelson Lynn, who lives in Lutherville.

Just as hospitals are replenishing their staffs and playing catchup after back-to-back snowstorms, they're bracing for another emergency: an onslaught of patients with snow-related injuries. During bad weather, emergency-room volume takes a dip. But once the snowbound emerge from their homes, they tend to overdo it, shoveling too much, driving on unsafe roads and aggravating existing illnesses that can land them in the ER. The result: cases that include children who hurt themselves sledding and adults with broken bones and head injuries from falling on icy streets.

Salary: $32,000 Age: 32 Years on the job: 10 How she got started: After high school, Erica Small knew she wanted to go into the medical field and started taking classes at what is now Stevenson University. She switched to the Community College of Baltimore County and became certified as an emergency medical technician and a certified nursing assistant. While still in school, she began working as a patient service associate in Sinai Hospital's emergency room. When she graduated from CCBC, she began working in the same department as a critical care technician.