Emergency departments in the region are slammed 'at a level we haven't seen before,' providers say
Vermont Public
When Dr. Trey Dobson started practicing emergency medicine in Vermont 20 years ago, he might arrive in the morning to see one patient who came in overnight still waiting to be discharged to a skilled nursing facility or rehab center.
Now, there are often five to eight patients in the emergency department each morning, waiting for a place to go.
“That's a third to a half of our emergency department,” Dobson said. He’s the chief medical officer at Southwestern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington, and he also works at the emergency department at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. “These patients, they might have been waiting 24 hours or 48 hours,” he said. “And you can’t bring them into the hospital because they don’t meet the regulatory requirements for inpatient hospitalization.”