Helping impaired physicians is part of our profession’s self-regulatory duty. The goal is to ensure patient safety, help physicians get help, and restore them to practice whenever possible.

Burnout is complex - with individual and systemic causes and solutions. Here are five systems and organizational-level ways to reduce it.

Physician (all healthcare worker) burnout is very costly to organizations, which means small investments to reduce it produce big returns financially and for clinicians’ quality of life.

Freestanding EDs are popular with patients and physicians but do little to expand access to care, reduce traditional ED congestion, and lower overall healthcare costs.

Once insured, undocumented immigrants with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) who were then able to get scheduled vs emergency-only hemodialysis (HD) has a drop in 1-year mortality (NNT = 7) and saved almost $6,000/person/month in healthcare costs.

Uninsured patients had 66% greater odds of ED discharge and 241% greater odds of ED transfer than similar privately insured patients in hospitals that had capacity to care for them in-house.

Evidence for the 1-hour bundle release by the Surviving Sepsis Campaign is weak. Yet, this is the new standard we are held to, despite ACEP, AAEM, and thousands of physicians, EM and non-EM alike, voicing concern that this is a very bad idea.

This editorial helps us understand how to avoid the bystander effect in medicine and has direct applicability for the ED.

This review of open source data since 1981 strongly suggests that the period of an assault weapons ban from 1994-2004 was associated a reduction in fatality from mass shootings.

The physician response to an incendiary tweet by the NRA last week has been striking. It has led to the hashtag #ThisIsOurLane, as the NRA admonished physicians to “stay in their lane” regarding gun policy. This is a review of the position statement by the American College of Physicians on reducing firearm deaths and injuries that sparked it all.