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Synopsis For My Emergency Department Essay

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I am writing a synopsis for my Emergency Department (E.D.) observation day. I was assigned to a soft-spoken intelligent nurse that had a giving and a sweet disposition. We were assigned a total of five patients, of which four we introduced ourselves and assessed. It is not that the day was slow, but my nurse was assigned to go to the front of the E.D. at 11:00 to work at the registration desk. The hospital has placed registered nurses at the registration desk to obtain the initial assessment of patients entering the E.R. doors to determine the priority and level of treatment needed. The first patient of the morning was a female that presented with a recent diagnosis of swollen salivary glands and she thought she was having an allergic reaction to the antibiotics she started taking yesterday; or she wondered if she was just swollen from her recent diagnosis and that’s what was causing dyspnea and shortness of breath. Intermittently Respiratory administered an albuterol treatment and we performed vital signs, assessed her and listened to her lungs with our stethoscopes (before breathing treatment), which was unnecessary for the fact that we could hear that she had stridor from standing across the room. As the nurse was documenting the patient’s vital signs, she made the comment under her breath that the protocol for the E.D. when someone comes in for shortness of breath, is to obtain an electrocardiogram (ECG), but she continued to say how the Nurse Practioner (N.P.) on

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