...THE EFFECTS OF OVERCROWDING IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM MICHELLE POWELL MSN –BL 510: NURSING PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS DEVELOPMENT MAY 20, 2012 PROFESSOR NKECHI ILEKA The Emergency department provides an extraordinary important public service mission by providing emergency care 24 hours a day, 365 days per year without discrimination by social or economic status (Derlet, Richards & Kravitz, 2001). One of the key foundations of EDs is to provide immediate access and stabilization for those patients with medical emergencies (Derlet et al, 2001). The Emergency Department has always been there available to help, unfortunately the basic tenet is now being challenged, and the general public may no longer be able to rely on EDs for quality and timely emergency care, placing the people at risk (Favotich & Hirsch, 2003). According to the Emergency Nurses Association all people are entitled to timely and appropriate access to safe and effective health care. This paper will discuss the problem of overcrowding in the Emergency Room and strategies that the Nurse leader may do to help control overcrowding. Overcrowding in the emergency department (ED) is the most serious issue confronting EDs in the developed world (Favotich & Hirsch, 2003). Overcrowding is a situation “in which the demand for emergency services exceeds the ability of department to provide quality care with acceptable time frames (Joint...
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...One of the main reasons for referrals to children’s mental health agencies is aggression with over half of emergency room referrals serving youth (Campbell, 2006; Dean et al., 2007; Margulies & Carlson, 2012). While latency age children comprise the greatest number of referrals to emergency rooms for aggression, only 5% of the referrals include preschool age children (Margulies & Carlson, 2012). Associated symptoms for child referrals include disobedience, suicidal intent/actions, self-injurious behaviour, emotional difficulty and over-activity (Campbell, 2006; Margulies & Carlson, 2012). The suggested reason for this is because children displaying such behaviours tend to be harder to manage and are considered to be more of a problem. This...
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...Shortage of Specialists in Emergency Rooms In today’s emergency rooms, it has become routine to not be able to see a specialist for the ailment a patient came in for. Many times, except in absolute emergencies, the patient’s pain will be treated and they will be referred to a specialist’s office and directed to make an appointment for follow up care. Many issues play into the reduction of specialists available in the emergency room and range from the need to pay specialists for their time on call to many specialists choosing to be exclusively office-based and not participating in emergency room call at all. Differences in Organizations In a situation such as specialist shortages, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations in the general hospital setting do not have many differences. A large scale not-for-profit healthcare system may have the funds to pay stipends to specialists to take call at their facilities. A small stand-alone for-profit hospital may not have the funds to pay such stipends. “…study cites financial and legal disincentives that might make specialists reluctant to stay on-call. These include lack of payment due to the high number of uninsured patients using emergency departments and legal liabilities that lead to high insurance premiums for specialists,” (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2011). The study above proves that the issues relating to the shortages are not a for-profit or not-for-profit issue but physician specific issues. How...
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...Pulling into Euclid Hospital Friday evening, February 24th at 7pm, the parking lot was very busy with consistent traffic flow in and out. Cars, Trucks and SUVs filled 90% of the parking lot. The Hospital was brick, light tan in color, sitting on approximately 17 acres. Green white and blue security truck sitting outside the E.R entrance where a big red hung over the glass revolving double doors that said “Emergency”. The front of the Emergency room entrance there were big glass square windows that went from the bottom of the building to the top. 3 large round posts stood several feet from the entrance. A large grass filled island was in the front of the doors that cars circled around. Inside the E.R lobby a sat against the big square glass...
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...Ashley, I enjoyed reading your post and getting the perspective of an emergency room nurse. I can understand how tough it is to deal with the same patients coming in for the same reasons repeatedly. While I agree with you and I believe having limits and rules can help curb the problem of patients constantly arriving in the ER, I feel that there is a much bigger problem in that there are not enough treatment programs for the people suffering from addiction and abuse issues. According to the Journal of Addictions Nursing (2015), “Roughly half of the patients diagnosed with such disorders in 2012 did not have access to medication-assisted treatment facilities” (p. 157). Emergency rooms must have resources and facilities available to aid and...
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...How Much Emergency Room Visit Cost With Insurance Patients visit emergency rooms when they have critical health conditions. Depending on the condition of the victim’s body, visiting an emergency room without a valid insurance cover can be extremely expensive. According to the health rules in the United States and other countries, when you visit a room of urgency without an insurance cover, the medics should treat you before referring you to another health facility for admission. For instance, if you get a bleeding wound, they should assist you in covering it. They should not leave the wound open. They should help in saving your life. The law prohibits the health practitioners working in the emergency rooms from dumping patients who need urgent health-related assistance. They should offer them high-quality treatment services until the victim stabilizes. However, that does not mean that you will not have to pay for the services. Without a health insurance cover, after stabilizing, you will pay huge amounts of money. The condition may bring hectic financial constraints to you and your family members. There are numerous benefits of having a health insurance cover from a reliable insurance company. When you get ill, they will pay the medical fees according to the...
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...I strive to enhance the quality of human life through sound investigation and precise medical judgment. My earliest influence in the medical field stemmed from frequent visits to Children’s Hospital of Cincinnati where I was diagnosed with chronic asthma. Fortunately, my unsolicited visits to the hospital opened a faucet of interest in medicine. My career goal was further solidified following my mother’s diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Her hypoglycemic episode was quickly treated and controlled by skilled emergency physicians who were astutely trained in treating urgent patients. I was impressed by the professionalism, skill and quality of care that emergency room physicians delivered within a short time frame. These experiences are what developed my desire to pursue a career in medicine; specifically emergency room medicine. I hope to prolong life by simply understanding the mechanism of human disease, validating prevention and identifying the most effective treatment of disease. I am currently a biology pre-medicine student studying at Malone University. Following...
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...This week, clinical assignment here at McKay Dee Hospital was in the Emergency Room. This is one of the largest Emergency Room serving northern Utah and southern Idaho. This clinical has been the one that I have been most looking forward to, after hearing stories from my cohort about their experiences in the emergency room that, only made me more excited for tonight. This is bad to say, I am not wishing harm anyone, but I was really wanting to see some acute trauma patients come through tonight. However, Windy and I care for multitude of patients tonight. We had pediatric patients present with fevers and we treatment with Motrin and were discharged home. One patient Windy referred to has having meth mouth, which came in with a large abscess...
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...medical care and insurance and how it impacts usage of emergency rooms was studied. Because of the changes in medical care and insurance, the Affordable Care Act, the emergency room has become a crowded doctor’s office. Lacking on the number of how much availability there is for patients in emergency rooms already, the need for emergency rooms continues to increase. The significance of this study is to see how the current changes in health care insurance have impacted how often or how many people visit the emergency room seeking medical attention. This study will help health care administrators with how to plan for the future when it comes to being most efficient in seeing patients in a timely manner and having the more serious patients visit the emergency room and less serious patients visiting primary care physicians. The social problem that is addressed is that there are many uninsured and underinsured individuals who turn to the emergency room seeking medical attention instead of having the opportunity to see a primary care physician. That contributes to the crowdedness of emergency rooms overall. This is an exploratory study because exploratory research is based off secondary research. For example, by reviewing available literature, data, or using qualitative approaches, which is how this study is conducted. The unit of analysis in this study is the effect of changes in the Affordable Care Act on the usage of emergency rooms. A theory that guides this research is purely to improve...
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...This is a 78-year-old patient who apparently had a severe lower back pain one week prior to arrival here in the emergency room while bending over she felt a crack in her back. In the subsequent week she had difficulty ambulating and started to have severe pain. She was unable to walk even on flat ground without assistance. She was unable to get up from a chair as well. The pain was intense and therefore she came to the emergency room on January 26, 2018. She has a prior medical history of vertigo cholecystectomy and partial hysterectomy. Initial evaluation the blood pressure was 166/98, her pulse was 84. The BUN was 33. The creatinine was 1.11. She was seen and evaluated in the emergency room. A CAT scan was done which showed a compression...
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...Running head: ASSIGNMENT 4 ORGANIZATION OF A HEALTH CARE FACILITY Assignment 4 HSA 515 Organization of a Health Care Facility As a chief operating officer, you are responsible for a 15-bed Emergency Room (ER). You have received many complaints within the last year regarding inadequate patient care, poor ER management, long wait times, and patients being sent away because of lack of space, staff, or physicians to provide appropriate care. Diagnose the root causes of the complaints about the clinic. In a 15-bed Emergency Room (ER), overcrowding of patients is the root cause for inadequate patient care in the ER. The increase in patients throughout the years with limited staff has become an issue for emergency rooms. The increase in patients is created by the increase in the number of aging population with chronic medical conditions and increasing number of uninsured or underinsured patients that go to the emergency room for everyday ailments. Due to the limited number of resources, the emergency room can not maintain an adequate number of physicians, nurses, and support staff to accommodate and care for the number of patients. Overcrowding not only creates long waiting times but also increases risks of medical errors. The physicians are over their capacity which can lead to undue stress and burnout, which in turns leads to poor and inadequate treatment to the patients. Due to the overcrowding, the ER physician will not have...
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...teachers name Professional Experience Paper Introduction Today I will be conducting an interview in the emergency department of a hospital. Emergency departments are different but most are the same. The one where I live operates 24 hours a day. The thing I find the best about them is they take any patient no matter race or problem or money. They can see someone with a toothache to a gunshot wound. The doctors are usually working long hours and they bounce from hospital to hospital. Patients are treated due to the severity of their illness. I found out that my local department is equipped with state of the art technology and all there equipment is led to a central unit. I find this department to be the most unique because they deal with a variety of problems. It’s one of them jobs where you never know what’s going to happen next. So they have to be ready for everything at all times. I knew that my hospital was doing some upgrades and they still are so I asked about what they were doing. They expanded to 24 private rooms including 3 trauma rooms. 10 general examination room and 6 express care beds. I learned that this is a small hospital compared to most. There primary objective is to register a patient and check there weight, blood, etc. And sit them to wait for the doctor if that’s what is needed. I would honestly love to work in a busy emergency room. It doesn’t want to make me choose it as a career path though because I’m not a big fan of pain and I know they see...
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...Community Emergency Preparedness and Response Paper NUR/408 April 2, 2012 University of Phoenix Community Emergency Preparedness and Response Paper Firefighters cannot contain a forest fire that has been blazing for five days. The risk of the fire is not life-threaten but citizens are encouraged to remain indoors unless necessary to leave home because of the smoky winds. The smoke from the fire is affecting many of the residents in the community, especially those with preexisting lung diseases. The local hospital is full and the emergency room is over crowed. Patients are in need of beds in the hospital. The entire staff is stressed and pressed to discharge patients quickly to make room for patients holding in the emergency room. In addition nursing staff is required to work overtime to meet the needs of the community. Next, the Neighborhood Senior Nursing Clinic has seen more seniors than usual this week because of the smoky winds. Many of the seniors have needed to use their oxygen more often than usual this week. The seniors have been advised by the nurse Karen at the Neighborhood Senior Nursing Clinic to stay indoors to avoid respiratory irritants. Unfortunately, there had been an increase in seniors coming to the clinic in the past couple of years related to lack of extracurricular activities available to seniors in the community. After that a second grade student at the neighborhood school was sent to the school nurse because of difficulty breathing. She was noted...
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...or concerns of the patients. With the change in the economy and the reasons for the emergency room being utilized, it is important to take a moment to see how the flow of the delivery of services can be confined to smooth transitions. This paper will include appropriate probability concepts, rationale, statistical analysis, and a decision tailored to research studies specific to the thesis statement, question response types, and classification of our findings. Thesis Question "Does the emergency room get utilized more by a particular race and is there a reason for this occurrence?" Appropriate Probability Concepts and Your Application of Them to Find Resulting Data To Limit the Uncertainty of this Decision Probability theory is an important part of statistical theory that bridges descriptive and inferential statistics. It is the science of uncertainty, chance or likelihood (Cooper & Schindler, 2008). There are three kinds of probability; classical, empirical and subjective. In this instance, we will focus on a mixture of empirical probability which is based on past experiences and subjective probability which a probability is assigned to an event based upon whatever evidence is available. A closer look will be taken at the records of the patients treated by the emergency care team in the last six months along with tracking the cases seen in the emergency room over the next six months. At the conclusion of this study, it is our hope to have a...
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...Overcrowding in Emergency Departments across the Country Overcrowding in Emergency Departments Abstract: Emergency departments (ED’s) are considered a necessary component in the health care system. Many patients have access to this department 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. There has been an increasingly large volume of emergency room visits by both adult and pediatric patients up to 43% within the last 5 years. The overuse of the ED’s medical services across the nation is commonly referred to as “overcrowding”. One major cause of overcrowding is the misuse of the emergency room. Another cause is the increased volume of illness. The third cause of overcrowding is a shortage of staff. These major issues can delay staff from providing care to those who need it most. Although staff gives priority to patients who have a higher acuity of illness these patients often have to wait long periods of time before a bed becomes available. Overcrowding is serious issue in the ED and most of the contributing factors are beyond the control of the emergency department. The first cause of overcrowding in the ED is the misuse of the emergency room. More than 50% of emergency room visits are for non-urgent concerns and over 46% of these medical complaints could have been solved by a primary care physician (PCP). PCP’s sometimes fail to properly communicate with their patients which can lead to the anxiety that sends the patient to seek assistance in the emergency room. In many...
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