The Florida College of Emergency Physicians needs your help. In order to better illustrate the daily problems we face in our Emergency Departments to the media and to our state legislators, FCEP is collecting stories about patients who have serious issues getting the care they need. This collection of stories will be posted on the FCEP website in the "Newsroom" section, and will be entitled "Access Denied Reports." They will also appear in EMpulse magazine. These reports will illustrate the difficulty our members have every day in getting proper, timely treatment for their patients, due to the problems inherent in the current Emergency Medicine system.

By taking the time to share your story you may well be helping ensure that access issues become the exception rather than the rule. Stories should not include private information of patients. They can be sent to FCEP Director of Communications Michael Citro at mcitro@fcep.org or phoned in to our Access Denied hotline (leave a recording) at (407) 276-0728.

These issues may include (but are not limited to): specialist shortage, difficulty finding another location with proper specialty coverage, issues with transferring a patient to another facility, complications from extended ER wait times or ambulance diversion, any combination of these, or any other situation in which the system is "broken" and thus denies a patient access to timely quality emergency care. These stories will be especially helpful in demonstrating real world examples of the issues we take to the media and the legislature every day.