Whether you live in the city or suburbs, hospitals can be overcrowded, under-staffed, insensitive to ailing patients, subjective as to how certified, and board recognized staff deal with patients. Each person that steps inside of the hospital doors should be treated equally and with the same importance. I know there are guidelines, policies, rules, and regulations as to what type of care can be administered and what approvals must take place. I thought the emergency room, meant just that - "emergency care".
Adults and children have died in emergency rooms because improper and inadequate care was administered. Many people are aware of the witness accounts of family members whose loved one was ignored and died while waiting for care that could have prevented the patient from dying. In addition, many of us witnessed the released hospital video a woman in a New York hospital left unattended and she died. They are very hard scenarios to swallow, when this could be anybody's parent, child, loved one or friend.
Hospitals complain that the overwhelming costs to provide care for the uninsured and underinsured has caused the disconnect that has created these "isolated situations". These are not isolated situations. People have died while employees took a break; they subjectively choose not to help a patient in obvious distress, and relatives or friends witness the casual conversations that can be heard while patients lay waiting for care.
I am outraged and dismayed at how our emergency rooms have failed any family that lost a loved one under these circumstances. An apology is not good enough. It does not bring back someone's mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, sister, brother, child, best friend or co-worker. It leaves people with cynicism about the type of care available to them and frightens people from seeking care about medical conditions they are facing. This broken trust between the hospital system and the victims' families needs to be bridged, but this process may take much longer a contract and a handshake. To recover from a preventable loss, may take a lifetime.
Emergency rooms are for emergencies.
Too often emergency rooms are used for by indigents, illegal aliens and the uninsured as a free source of health care because they know they cannot be turned away or charged. Often this care is for medical conditions that are not even close to emergencies.
Of course nothing is free and an emergency room is one of the most expensive and therefore inappropriate places to treat things like the sniffles that really ought to be addressed in a much less expensively equipped and staffed private doctors office or a clinic.
My solution is that emergency rooms should practice triage screening. When a patient is admitted they should be quickly and briefly screened to determine if there is truly an emergency. The real emergencies should be treated immediately and the non-emergencies should be shunted off in the waiting room where they should realistically expect to wait a verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry long time until all other real emergencies are cleared. The triage screening of the waiting room should be repeated periodically to ensure that somebody who had been initially classified as non-emergency was not in fact becoming an emergency.
Society needs to do something for the poor and the uninsured. (The illegal aliens should of course be sent home. Their health problems are the problem of the country where they hold citizenship. If they need emergency health care to stabilize them we should do that before putting them on the bus or plane.) We should probably provide more and better free clinics. This would be a lot cheaper then providing the same service in an emergency room..
I totally agree with you about repeated triage of ER patients. I recently went to my local hospital ER because I thought I was having a stroke. The pain in my neck and arms was so severe I felt faint. The registration called a paramedic to come out and triage me. He looked me up and down and said "you're not having a stroke". Then they put me in a ER treatment room while I waited for someone to see me. It was 20 minutes before a nurse came to take my vitals. (I watched the paramedics look through magazines while I sat in agony waiting for someone to check on me.) The ER doc came and said I probably have a stiff neck and ordered some xrays of neck. Then they gave me pain medicine and a muscle relaxant and sent me home. No blood tests were taken. No one came to check on me while I waited in that ER treatment room. No blood pressure or pulse taken during the 20 minutes wait. There were other patients in other ER rooms, two were being admitted and one baby was sreaming. One nurse was taking care of all the patients in the ER. What is so upsetting is why couldn't the paramedics check on me and other patients to help the nurse?
of how our medical system is run. I hear horror stories all the time. My brother's friend had to wait in a hospital for hours just to be looked at when he injured his neck. Later, he was put in a neck brace and sent home. Untill the doctor realized that his insurance did not cover the neck brace, called him back, removed the brace, and sent him on his way.
I was injured with a baseball bat when I was younger (a friend had hit me with it accidently while joking around) and spent a vast majority of my day waiting while my guts felt like they were on fire
"How can we win where fools can be kings" Muse
So, you blame the employee who took a break for people dying? Are the doctors, nurses, and techs working in the ER not important enough to be treated as humans as well? Look at the other side of the equation before you go condemning people for mistakes. It's hard to work in an ER. And if you expect them to work around the clock so that no one dies, they'll be giving poorer care to those who they do treat.
Also, I highly encourage that you read this article: http://www.physorg.com/news143804877.html. It may shed some light on some of the assumptions you and others have made regarding our health system.
~C
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I read the article and it made sinse. a lot of the overcrowding ER has to do with the aging population, and the lose of primary care doctors.
but i think there is no excuse if someone dies waiting to be seen by a doctor in an ER waiting room.
i actually saw the recording of the women dying in the ER waiting room. There were patients and people walking by and around her ignoring that she was dying that very moment.
something should have been done it that situation
I don't believe everything I read and that study does not smell right.
Most hospitals are private and need to make a profit. If they don't make a profit they close their doors.
It seems to me that if emergency rooms are extremely crowded that would be a sign of a highly profitable enterprise. They are providing a service that is in high-demand. Of course those profits are only realized if either the patient or an insurance company pays the bill.
There have been lots of hospital closures in recent years and those have been disproportionately located in areas close to the border where the emergency rooms are forced to treat large numbers of illegal immigrants who don't pay their bills.
I think emergency rooms are crowded because it is a money losing business. If it were profitable hospitals would be expanding their emergency rooms to attract a greater segment of a lucrative and highly demanded business. The government mandate that they treat everybody who walks in the door has destroyed the business model and has guaranteed that hospitals deliberately put emergency care as a low priority and keep their capacity as low as possible to minimize their losses.
Liberal and progressive thinkers have a hard time understanding this but markets work and when you distort markets with mandates, no matter how well intentioned, you often get undesireable results.
I have worked in medical emergency rooms. So, I can speak on this topic with great clarity and understanding. As a professional, I have seen some unacceptable behavior. It is the same experience those who work as police officers get. Scrutiny is what each person receives when you work in any environment. With all of the training that you must endure, it makes no sense to see what I have seen.
If you work in an emergency room and you have seen the opposite experiences, than I understand your comment. Explore giving more details to make better comparisons for those who have not had the pleasure of having encountered the great professionals that you know. However, the experience of having first hand knowledge and experience of us supersedes any assumptions you think I may have.
I respect your opinion, but you should be careful in the tone of your comments.
I am by no means condoning the actions of all people who work in the ER. But you make it seem as if you believe that people should not take breaks when working in an ER, because someone might die. Well, it's an emergency room. Some people will die, regardless of what happens.
I do not work in an emergency room. I work in another aspect of healthcare (actually, I've worked in a few other aspects of healthcare, including insurance billing). Frankly, I think that some of the people in the ER need to be trained a little better, because there's no reason people should be coming to me with bruises all over their arms as a result of the ER techs trying to get blood out of them, when I can go in and stick them once and get all the blood I need from them. Same goes for nurses who work on the wards. But that, of course, is outside the scope of this discussion.
~C
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I would like to comment on your reply about emergency room personnel. I have worked in healthcare for over 21 years . I was the Business Office Manager and part of my responsibilities was over seeing ER registration, which of course, includes Triage and Emtala. I agree that nurses are busy in the ER most times. What I don't like is that paramedics or ER Techs sitting around flipping through magazines, making personal calls, discussing what they are going to eat for lunch, etc, while there are patients waiting to be taken care of! Why does that nurse have to carry that whole load of responsibility? Why can't the Adminastrative staff have a process in place to insure that all ER patients are triaged, and triaged again, while they wait? Why is that a lack of accountability for emergency romm care? Patient satisfaction scores are at an all time low.
Imagine the elderly patient that comes to the ER. She has no family or friends nearby. She is triaged(maybe) casually, the put in an ER treatment room. She sits and waits for someone to get around to her. She waits and waits. ER techs and paramedics order there lunch, flip through magazines, talk about their weekend, sex life, or whatever. (Meanwhile the the ER nurse is taking care of every patient in every treatment room that is occupied). When the nurse finally has a chance to get to this elderly patient...............she has died.
There is so much of "its not my job" mentality in our emergency rooms it is riduculous!