1) When a patient arrives in the Emergency Room how does the staff know who to see first? The ER staff know whom to see first by checking the patients that are the most critical ill by a clever system called triage, subsequently they check whoever they have arrived first. 2) What’s triage? Describe the process for triage. Triage- the sorting of and allocation of treatment to according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors. Moreover, the system categorizes the condition of patients into three stages: Minimal (III-Green) Patients have minimal injuries, are ambulatory, and can self-treat or seek alternative medical attention independently. Examples: include minor lacerations, contusions, and abrasions. Delayed (II-Yellow) Patients require definitive …show more content…
Examples: are tension pneumothorax, respiratory distress, major internal hemorrhage, and airway injuries Expectant (O-Black) Patients have lethal injuries and will die despite treatment. Examples: include devastating head injuries, major third-degree burns over most of the body, and destruction of vital organs. The severity of illness of a person is based partially on the symptoms but also on the person’s vital signs, age, prior medical history and other factors that raise the likelihood of a life threatening illness. 3) What is trauma? Trauma- Bodily injury caused by force, psychological/emotional stress, or psychic trauma 4) What happens during a cardiac arrest (code)? Cardiac arrest occurs suddenly and often without warning. It is triggered by an electrical malfunction in the heart that causes an irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia). With its pumping action disrupted, the heart cannot pump blood to the brain, lungs and other
I found your post interesting, having worked in an emergency department during my paramedic years. In my career as a nurse working in a clinic on occasion we must send a patient to the emergency department. I always call to speak with the charge nurse to provide report prior to just sending the patient, often I am on hold for greater than 15 minutes. This often results in the patient arriving at the ER before I can give report. Adding to this the charge nurse on more than one occasion is calling me on another line to ask why the patient it there! However, from past experience I do know how busy the ER can be at any given time.
Considering the conflicting findings amongst the different EWS, it remains unknown whether these scoring systems are effective in identifying and responding to deteriorating patient in acute hospital settings. This essay intends to establish how successful, if at all, the EWS in particular SHEWS is in identifying deteriorating patients in acute surgical hospital settings. In order to do this we will be returning to patient X, a 22-year-old Asian female with a diagnosis of acute pancreatitis. By comparing the evidence base to reality I hope to get a better understanding of how effective this tool is in identifying deteriorating patients.
and giving medicine and IVs. A RN makes sure the patient has knowledge of their situation and
When everyone is working on the patient making progress in different directions, the patient will be completely lost and eventually lose confident in the caretakers. Atul Gawande describes this through a car analogy in which a vehicle is made using the best features of different manufactures. He describes the care as, “A very expensive pile of junk that does not go anywhere… It’s not a system.” Everyone has a different skill set that if used in a collaborative way the medical team will be able to identify the problem more efficiently, recognize areas of failure and address them in a timely manner, and lastly with an ordered system the patient-physician relationship will form a stronger bond. With a more ordered work environment, the health care professionals will be able to attend to the patient more keeping them informed and be able to interact with the physician more frequently. Just to show how well this order work Gawande noticed that with an implemented checklist complication rates fell 35 percent and the death rates decrease 47 percent far more than any drug. This will allow the physician and nurses to not only help the patient with physical treatments such as medicine but psychologically as
Because of the lack of organization with the health care providers in Canada, the wait times are too long and can cause serious complications to any condition the patient went in for in the first place. This situation of how the health care system can resolve wait times was brought to the government but they continue to ignore the proposals brought to them. It is possible to resolve the problems of wait times without extreme change and expenses in the health care system. The solution is to be found in the reorganization of the health care providers. Lack of assistance in the emergency room can make ones illness to become worse, therefore, causes the patient to be forced to wait in emergency rooms for an extended period of time and when they are finally seen by a health care provider, the outcome is very poor due to lack of registered staff, physicians and proper assessment(Goldman & Macpherson, 2005, p.40). The objective of this paper is to discuss and critically analyze the conditions of emergency waiting rooms. The specific issue this paper intends to explore is extensive and prolonged waiting times for patients accessing health care, patients who need urgent treatment and the vulnerability of elderly patients and children. With an in-depth critique of the barriers to health care and shortcomings of emergency rooms, strategies will be provided to enhance a health care system that makes it more accessible and efficient.
Process Excellence in the emergency department is a team collaboration that has a focus of interest for improving quality of care for patients. Team collaboration in health care is recognized as a group of health care workers from different disciplines working together on a common goal. This particular “multidisciplinary” (Finkelman, 2012, p. 336) team meeting was a collaboration of team members that included: the Emergency Room (ER) Director, ER physicians, and ER nurses, ER Head Health Unit Coordinator, ER Business Manager, Senior Process Excellence Coordinator, Director of Information Management, and the Senior Marketing Specialist. This team’s purpose aims to organize a team approach to care for patients treated in the emergency department and focuses on the care approach that provides continuity of care to patients. This focus on the patient is aimed to provide not only a higher level of patient satisfaction, but also to improve professional satisfaction by developing approach by emergency room staff to provide care as team collaboration. This process excellence team has been meeting for over two years in hopes of this goal being reached. This paper aims to help the reader gain a better understanding of this specific team collaboration, the roles of its members, and the communication methods utilized.
The American Heart Association gives sufficient evidence for the need of change by acknowledging that sudden cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death (2012). These fatalities affect both adult and child victims. Statistics also show that 70% of people feel helpless during a cardia...
Sayah, A., Rogers, L., Devarajan, K., Kingsley-Rocker, L., & Lobon, L. F. (2014). Minimizing ED Waiting Times and Improving Patient Flow and Experience of Care. Emergency Medicine International, 2014, 1-8. doi:10.1155/2014/981472
trained individuals. Imagine a family member is admitted to the University of South Alabama Hospital with an acute case of pneumonia, which will require oral and intravenous medications.
Case Management Case management has become the standard method of managing health care delivery systems today. In recent decades, case management has become widespread throughout healthcare areas, professionals, and models in the United States. It has been extended to a wide range of clients (Park & Huber, 2009). The primary goal of case management is to deliver quality care to patients in the most cost effective approach by managing human and material resources. The focus of this paper is on the concept of case management and how it developed historically, the definition of case management, the components of case management, and how it relates to other nursing care delivery models.
Prioritizing care is one of the first things that nurses learn in their career. Prioritizing requires critical thinking whether it comes to discharging a patient, caring for a patient, or delegating a task to a LPN or CNA. As the charge nurse they must look at the whole picture and not just the tasks that need to be done. The charge nurse is the one makes the assignments for the individual nurses, so if there happens to be a float nurse from a different department they might give them the patients with the lowest acuity depending on the nurse’s experience. The charge nurse must know which patients could be discharged if there was an emergency to arise or not enough hospital beds for those patients who need to be admitted. For example, the nurse is not going to recommend someone who came in with a heart attack; they would most likely recommend someone who is two days post op and is being discharged to a rehab facility in a couple of days. It is the charge nurses duty to make that everyone providing great and safe care to the patient.
I believe that if you asked a group of people to list off issues regarding an emergency department then they would say long wait times throughout the process and being moved around to different areas of the emergency department. From what I have heard the long waits can be associated with waiting to get back to a room, waiting to see a nurse, waiting to see a doctor, waiting to go to radiology or lab, waiting on results, waiting to be discharged, or waiting to be admitted. All of these things in my opinion add up to one main problem, which is patient flow through an emergency department. In my opinion being able to have a controlled patient flow allows for improved wait times and decreased chaos for patients. So there are a few things
...inding the suited vehicle which is the closest to the emergency. The vehicle number will be logged and informed of the emergency. Along with the patient information and incident to expect sent to the vehicle, the GPS will provide directions from the current location to the patient and quickest path back to the hospital. The GPS will give the hospital personnel an idea of how long it will take the vehicle to get to the hospital and have equipment, room, and personnel ready to help the patient. By taking the quickest path, along with medical personnel being ready for receiving the patient, could mean the difference of life and death depending on the incident.
Cardiac arrest is a sudden unexpected loss of heart function, breathing, and consciousness. It can be temporary sometimes. It is caused when the heart’s electrical system malfunctions. A common arrhythmia in cardiac arrest is ventricular fibrillation. It can be reversed if CPR is performed. A defibrillation can be used to shock the heart. If so, it should be restore a normal heartbeat in minutes..
This reflection of vital signs will go into discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of each vital sign and the importance of each of them. Vital signs should be assessed many different times such as on admission to a health care facility, before and after something substantial has happened to the patient such as surgery and so forth (ref inter). I learned to assess blood pressure (BP), pulse (P), temperature (T) and respiration (R) and I will reflect and discuss which aspects were more difficult and ways to improve on them. While pulse, respiration and temperature were fairly easy to become skilled at, it was blood pressure which was a bit more difficult to understand.