Quote:
Originally Posted by ortman118
We also had a horrible experience at the ER. In March of last year I took my husband who was in great pain from a kidneystone to the ER around 6PM. He was triaged and then we sat with a plastic bucket for his vomiting for 4 hours in the waiting room. We left and went home with him never being seen and after others there told us they had been waiting 8 hours. He passed the kidney stone at home later that night. We received a bill for $392.40. Same explanation given to us as you. When we complained about the extensive wait the response was "well we are pretty busy during snowbird season". So unless we have an emergency during off season we will head to Leesburg ER. It really galls me to read the accolades in the newspaper on how great the ER is.
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And there is just no excuse for that. Just get him in a room, start an IV, get a urine and abdominal flat plate, and shoot him up with IV Zofran and morphine. Shouldn't take more than 20 minutes.
I do appreciate the staffing issues that arise when the service population goes from 80,000 to 130,000 virtually overnight, but that is administration's problem, it shouldn't be the patient's. If the ER rooms are backed up because of patients waiting to go to a floor, implement the suggestions I made above.
I agree with Db, there may be a laziness factor in play. An ER room filled with a patient just waiting to go upstairs is almost no work; putting a new patient in there is a lot of work. Also, ER staff tend to have a shift mentality, if they can make it to next shift it's not their problem any more. That needs to change.
Also this is the 3rd or 4th post about patients sitting in the waiting room and given a bucket to vomit into. Horrible. Administration needs to realize that right or wrong, the ER is the "face" of the hospital to most of the community. I would never tolerate that in any ER I was running, the nice nurse who posted above wouldn't tolerate it, and I don't think the patient population should either. No one in pain EVER wants to hear "we're busy".