Quote:
Originally Posted by golfing eagles
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".
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Remember when the new ER was going to be the solution to all the the problems of the then current ER? I stated then that architecture seldom resolves all those issues. The physicians, IMHO, were the bottleneck at that time and probably remain so.
So, why are patients being dumped into the ER with all the grand new space available? And is the holding area for those waiting for inpatient rooms being used? (Usually this just results in patients being held in the ER longer, as GE has pointed out.)
Current practice in hospital design eliminates the large nursing stations and creates smaller distributed staff work stations for 2-3 people. This keeps docs and staff moving around to keep them closer to patients.
The ER physician group, unless it has changed recently, is based out of the Ft. Lauderdale area. It relies heavily on Locum Tenens physicians. I terminated their contract at one hospital in the late '90s.
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