Quote:
Originally Posted by Russ_Boston
I was working in the ER the other day and we had 7 (yes 7) EMS teams waiting in the ER halls with their patient. The rule is that they have to remain until their patient is seen by an ER doc and assigned an ER room.
It is not a matter of under-staffing it is a case of overpopulation. Every single one of our ER rooms was full plus the 7 EMS in the hall with another 20 (?) or so in the waiting room.
We can not release a patient to an admit floor until a room becomes available. So the wait is long. I was down there to act as stop gap nurse as if the patient had been admitted 'upstairs'.
This time of year there are simply too many patients and not enough rooms. In the summer it is just the opposite. The down side of a hospital in a 50% snowbird (plus guests in the winter) community.
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To add to this..People are not taken in turn when coming to an ER. Remember..it is an EMERGENCY Department. Each ER has a triage system numbered 1-5. One meaning you're actually dieing right then and there. They trump everybody and anybody coming in. Level 2 is someone who's in very serious danger..life threatening danger. An emergent stroke or MI. Your cut finger is not a 2 and in many cases not even a 3. While it's imporant to you and an emergency to you..to the hospital the Heart Attack in room-1 and the gunshot in room 3 and car accident in room 7 all take predecent. Unless you are TRULY dieing, plan on waiting. A 7 hour ER wait is unfortuantely not a very long wait. In many cases in larger cities the waits can run anywhere from 24-36 hours. Yep, that's right.
Now if you think that calling the big red bus is your ticket to a bed even faster, don't bank on it. Nothing irritates the ER staff much more than you taking the bus to the back door when you're going to be triaged as a 3 or lower. And Mr. Russ is quite correct in saying that the EMS teams have to stay with their deliveries on their gurneys until there is an acceptable bed for them to be handed off to. Of course if you have called the big red bus for a trivial matter, and you get coded somewhere between a 3 and 5, the charge nurse will very likely have you removed from your gurney, and given a seat in the waiting room, and release the EMS team.