U.S. specialists staying out of the ER

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 (UPI) -- U.S. hospitals are having a hard time finding doctors willing to serve as on-call specialists in their emergency rooms, The Washington Post reports.

A 2005 survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians found that 73 percent of 1,328 hospital emergency department directors said they were having difficulties finding specialists willing to put in 24-hour shifts on call. That was up from 67 percent a year earlier.

For stroke and heart-attack victims and in many other emergency situations, seeing a specialist promptly can be a life-and-death matter.

Experts say that the problem is not a shortage of specialists but of specialists rejecting emergency duty. They fear malpractice suits if something goes wrong or not getting paid for treating the uninsured.

"It's our responsibility to take care of these patients, because that's what we do. That's part of our inherent fiber of being an orthopedic surgeon," said Dr. Leon Benson, a Chicago-area hand surgeon near Chicago. "But there's no question that as the inconvenience and fatigue and poor compensation and difficulty in having appropriate resources to take care of patients build up, you get this perfect-storm effect where more and more people are saying, 'Gee, I don't know if I want to do this any more.' "