Emergency Rooms or Hospitals Deserve a more Positive Recognition than They Truly Receive

Emergency room over utilization is one of the leading causes of today’s ever increasing healthcare costs. The majority of the patients seen in emergency rooms across the nation are Medicaid recipients, for non-emergent reasons. The federal government initiated Medicaid Managed Care programs to offer better healthcare delivery, adequately compensate providers and reduce healthcare costs. Has Medicaid Managed Care addressed the issues and solved the problem? The answer is ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.

I would like to give you some insight as to the daily operation of a major Emergency Department in this city. Not unlike many other “ER’s” the nursing staff is tasked with the triage or assessment of patients in order to sort by priority. The nurse is then tasked with maintaining flow of the department and ensuring the timely care and physician evaluation of patients. This requires clinical nursing judgement and expertise which is tested constantly. To explain this plainly, nurses are faced with a meat grinder which cannot stop. There may be twenty patients in the lobby with ambulances lining up. The room nurses are trying to

In the essay by Chambliss’ essay, “Just Another Routine Emergency”, we learn of the best strategies that are used in the ER’s across the USA to routinize chaos. One of the main strategies used is keeping the public out of the work area. By doing this it helps maintain tranquility for the patients and the hospital staff. It is normal for people to panic during an emergency, but it is just the opposite for healthcare professionals

Every patients main concern when going to a hospital is to get a surgery to fix a problem that they have, or to receive prescriptions for illnesses and diseases. But a factor most probably are not worried about when they go to a hospital is how they are being treated. Doctors already have a difficult task to perform, but overcrowding the hospitals will cause them to be busy and possibly conduct their job with out the amount of care that is required. Giving out prescriptions in a hospital could also be effected. Patients vital medicine could be mixed up with someone else’s and cause even more harm.

Doctors are busy giving family members updates on their loved ones. Traumas are coming in with families in complete fear. Admitting staff trying to get information from the families to get patients registered while trying explain to patients why they must stay, and why some procedures aren’t covered by insurance. The thousands of questions the admitting staff get from patients about their stay all the while being invisible to majority of the staff. That is the Emergency room, that is what an ordinary person walking in does not see. The clicks and the social norms and the hierchy involved in hospital care. The disconnect of clinical staff from non-clinical staff. This same disconnect that contributes to low emergency room patient satisfaction scores, the reason why people leave the ER unhappy. People who work in the ER come in all shapes and sizes. Most of the nurses are females with just a few male nurses, all of which are between 20 to 60 years of age. Admitting staff is made up of males and females from different social backgrounds. The ER is a melting pot, which sometimes can be difficult to

Hospitals are not the best places; no one wants to stay, but one was my favorite place for six months. People think of hospitals as some place to sit and wait for bad news. Brunswick hospital is the hospital I visited every day. It had plain white walls, red seats to sit in while waiting, and had a great staff. I was in sixth grade living life as any normal eleven year old. Life was a breeze. Then on February twenty-sixth, my whole world changed. My mother found out she had stage three Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. “Mom was going to die,” was the only thing running though my little scatter brain. She would not see my graduate or follow my dreams.

A cacophony of screams, wails and the stomach churning rumblings of uncontrolled bodily functions filled St. Andrew's ER. A small child’s incessant crying sounded from the curtained cubicle to Booker’s right, the piercing shrieks jangling his nerves. Paroxysmal coughing assaulted him from the left, and he instinctively placed a shaky hand over his nose and mouth, shielding himself from the exposed germs floating unseen through the contaminated air. Rancid odors hung heavily in the air; the foul smells mingling with the faint scent of disinfectant, and he longed to make his escape. He hated being in proximity to the sick and dying, not just because hospitals were a breeding ground for all manner of diseases, but because they reminded him of his mortality and the

For a moment, think of this health care providers working on a busy emergency room, call lights are blinking, an ambulance has just arrived to bring a new patient involved in a road crash some 3 miles from the hospital, an active resuscitation is going on, and 4 non-emergency patients are waiting to be attended to. One can expect the staff to be at one time be physically, mentally and emotionally drained.

When I saw my aunt and uncle walk into the waiting room, fresh tear stains streaked upon their cheeks, I knew. When my uncle opened his mouth to say something and nothing came out but a child like squeal, my heart was torn in half. When someone finally said the words ‘she’s gone’ to the family members that had just arrived, getting my extremities cut off of my body one by one would have most certainly hurt less. I shut down and sat in that too clean smelling hospital room, little by little people began to say their good-byes to each other and leave, while I just sat. My grandpa walked in and I looked up at the red neon clock on the wall to see that a hour had passed. Without saying a word, he motioned and walked with me out of the room to the end of the hallway where my sister and cousin were sitting. The corner where the four of us sat, you could look out the windows into a sea of city

Oddly enough, hospitals are designed to feel tranquil and 'serene.'Ironically, the light shade of green and blue on the walls gives it that familiar to most funeral home. Its bleak institutional tile floor and the large heavy metal doors with a small frame of square window, just enough for one to peep through the inside of a private room. They are engineered to open silently without slamming made it seem morgue like. Every floor had their own reception and nurse stations, the private and semi private rooms looked identical to eachother except that the semi private rooms are separated by a curtain. One thing they had in common is that they all had waiting areas. Each room had patients, while each waiting rooms had people waiting in it.

Overloaded ED - Currently ED looks like a Black Hole. ED was built for 16,000 but handling over 45,000 patients- the emergency room at Emanuel Medical Center was experiencing increasing pressure to deliver services in an increasingly difficult healthcare environment,

In the past two weeks, I’ve had family death and family hospitalized which caused a great amount of stress on me. My grandfather’s oldest brother died a month before his birthday, October 26th. It left a great deal of pain on my chest as I watched his grandchildren speak about him in ways I didn’t know was possible. Shortly before his death, my grandfather was hospitalized. I became accustomed to him being hospitalized since it was something unordinary. I didn’t expect this visit to be one of great length, but as usual with visits like these, I was mistaken.

Finally, humor keeps those that work in traumatic situations from becoming disheartened. Because of the nature of their work, most of the individuals that work in the ER have a high burnout rate. There are so many negative aspects of working in the ER that doctors and other workers cannot handle for an extended period of time. The anxieties due to the unknowns such as how many people will need medical attention, what the nature of their injuries are, etc. cause additional stress to an already stressful schedule. Because accidents can happen at any time, ER workers have to work at night, which is unappealing to many. Because of these negative aspects, ER work is very difficult, and many people who work in this environment eventually want out. Humor lightens the blow of many of these negative aspects, and at least makes working in the hospital a little more bearable. Humor keeps hospital staff from physically becoming depressed. With the mass number of illness, surgery, and death that they are encompassed with, working in the hospital can wipe out one’s physical energy and mental state of well-being. Humor offers a levity of the morose and depressing environment that they are surrounded by each day. The emergency room is not a room that people should take lightly. The very nature of its services that it provides to its clientele prove it to be a

I am fascinated to know that Renown has a pediatric emergency room, while other hospitals in our area do not have this accommodation. This facilitates children’s visits at a faster rate and it’s nice to see that they are receiving extra attention because they are the future to our society. By having this, we can assure their healthiness at a higher level and would grant them the ability to have a long life and continue to innovate the world we live in. This is why the health industry is very important to continue resolving medical mysteries and accelerating our comprehension process on

What are some challenges for exams performed in the emergency room? What are good ways to deal with these challenges? What are the advantages of performing exams in the emergency room?