by Adisyn Lee

Created on: August 30, 2008

"Behind The Other Curtain"

Tens of thousands of people seek assistance from emergency care on any given day. People flood into Emergency waiting rooms with complaints that range from a simple medication refill to more life threatening complaints such as shortness of breath or heart attacks. It can be difficult no matter the complaint to wait the extended waiting time that is inevitable in any ER that you go to. As an Emergency Nurse I even find it hard when I or one of my family members are found waiting for hours, and I know the workings of an ER. This can be frustrating and often gives those that feel as though they did not get the care that they deserved a negative view of the entire Emergency System. I assure you that the staff feels your frustration, not only because we have to take the complaints but also because we take pride in what we do and it is hard to see the patients that we care about (and we do care) wait for hours in a crowded waiting room suffering because we have no rooms to put them in. This is caused by several factors such as acuity, which means severity of illness, ambulance traffic, number of available beds within the facility, and most importantly the misuse and abuse of the entire emergency medical system by those that choose to use it as primary care physicians. I think the key to becoming less frustrated is by becoming more educated about the process of moving through an ER.

When a patient first enters the door of an emergency room they find themselves greeted by a registration clerk. The role of the clerk is to take the patients name and complaint to pass on to the triage nurse. The triage nurse uses this to adequately prioritize the patients that he or she may need to evaluate first. For example, if a nurse has two patients one being a possible broken ankle and the other being a chest pain, naturally the triage nurse is going to evaluate the chest pain first. We prioritize on the ABCs, Airway, Breathing, and Circulation. If the patient presents with complaints that affect any of these three categories they are immediately placed ahead of patients that, while may be in severe pain are not in immediate risk of loss of life or limb. This is frustrating for the patient that is stable enough to wait because regardless of the time that a patient has waited if more acute patients present to the ER these patients will continue to go ahead of the less severe, thus the reason for the extended wait times. The registration clerk, and triage

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