Emergency Department Crowding: A Systematic Review of Causes, Consequences and Solutions

Why this matters here

Morley and colleagues’ systematic review in PLoS ONE synthesizes evidence on emergency-department crowding—its multifactorial causes, associations with delayed care and poorer patient outcomes, and proposed solutions. Why Collaboration Is So Hard places that pressure inside a working ED board where arrival, triage, and disposition clocks outrun the pace of care. The review establishes crowding’s clinical and operational stakes; the book asks how collaboration fails when time metrics and human attention cannot keep the same tempo.