GOMER

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In medical slang, a gomer is a patient of any age who is dirty or undesirable, or somebody elderly who is suffering from dementia or confusion.

However, some doctors would specifically limit it to a poor or old person with some chronic condition whose need isn’t urgent but who is keeping somebody with a more serious problem from getting treatment, or patients admitted potentially indefinitely for "social" reasons, because they cannot be cured by the hospital, but suffer non-life threatening chronic disabilities not which cannot by adequately managed in the community.

The term often appears in glossaries of the sort of medical jargon that never appears, or should never appear, in patients’ notes.

Much of this is created by hard-pressed medical types who use gallows humour to distance themselves enough from human suffering to remain sane. It is often said to be an acronym of “Get Out of My Emergency Room!”.

The term GOMER was popularized by the 1978 novel The House of God by Samuel Shem (pen-name of Stephen Bergman). In this book, the word is an acronym of "Get Out of My Emergency Room" and is applied to patients who are frequently admitted with complicated but uninspiring and incurable conditions. He often refers to them as being "too old to die."

Stephen King borrowed the term in his 2006 novel Lisey's Story.