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It may seem logical to blame your overcrowding problems on understaffing, but as the ED staff at the 302-bed North Shore University Hospital at Forest Hills in Queens, NY, found out, that may not always lead you to the root of your problems. Learning that lesson, and finding the real cause of their problems, enabled them to slash their average cycle time from 187 minutes to 118 minutes.
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As the ED staff at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allen-town, PA, have learned, its how you respond to benchmarking data that determines success. For example, to speed up admissions, it was necessary to address virtual capacity issues.
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A new planning guide funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is designed to help communities make sure they have needed drugs and vaccines in the event of a natural epidemic or bioterrorist attack.
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If several patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) started coming into your ED, would you be prepared to separate them? Could you triage to alternative off-site areas, if needed? As of Jan. 1, 2005, youd better be prepared.
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As EDs have grown and become overcrowded, environment of care issues also have grown, particularly security concerns, says Dean Samet, associate director/senior engineer of accreditation operations/Standards Interpretation Group at the Joint Commission.
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Physicians and nurse managers in emergency medicine stand a better change of boosting their income through incentive packages, as opposed to straight salary increases, according to industry observers. And if you did receive a significant salary boost in the past year, chances are youre an ED nurse manager not a physician manager.
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An analysis tool commonly used for investigating adverse events and other process errors in health care can prove useful in the ED as well, say experts who have seen it used to address long wait times and similar problems. The technique is called root-cause analysis (RCA), and chances are youve heard the term tossed around, but its not as likely that youve actually employed it in the ED.
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A root-cause analysis (RCA) is a complex tool that requires professional training, but an ED manager can utilize it with the help of an expert, says Kenneth A. Hirsch, MD, PhD, a practicing psychiatrist and director of Medical Risk Management Associates, a consulting firm in Honolulu.