In medical slang, a true gomer is a patient who, in spite of old age and multiple diseases, just never seems to die. In recent times, however, a gomer has become a patient of any age who is dirty or undesirable, or somebody elderly who is suffering from dementia or confusion. Medical slang is the slang of doctors, nurses, paramedics and other hospital and medical staff. ...

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 which cannot be 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." This article is about the book The House of God. ... Samuel Shem is the pen-name of the psychiatrist Stephen J. Bergman (1944-). His main works are The House of God and Mount Misery, both fictional but close-to-real first-hand descriptions of the training of doctors in the United States. ...

Stephen King borrowed the term in his 2006 novel Lisey's Story. Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of over 200 stories including over 50 bestselling horror novels. ... // Events June 26, 2006: J.K. Rowling reaveals that two characters will die in the seventh book of the Harry Potter series. ... Liseys Story. ...