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While the Plan B controversy has dominated emergency medicine news lately, there are several other ethical issues that arise in the ED from time to time and can create conflicts for ED physicians and nurses.
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The staff at the University of Utah Hospital, Salt Lake City, is taking a proactive approach to the possibility of an avian flu or other influenza pandemic, and the ED is playing an integral role in the development of the response plan.
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The ED staff at Saint Francis Medical Center in Cape Girardeau, MO, is justifiably proud of the Compass Award it recently received from Press Ganey Associates of South Bend, IN, for raising their patient satisfaction scores from the 36th percentile to the 96th. But they'll also be the first to tell you it wasn't easy.
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A newly opened telemedicine primary care facility in Peachtree City, GA, called Health-e-Station, will help curtail the severe overcrowding problems facing area EDs, according to its founder.
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Patients who come to EDs with minor conditions do not contribute significantly to delays and overcrowding, despite widely held beliefs to the contrary, according to a new study published on-line by the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
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The recent federal approval of nonprescription sales of the emergency contraceptive Plan B (Barr Laboratories; Woodcliffe Lake, NJ) to women and men ages 18 and older may have quieted what was a brewing controversy in emergency medicine. However, the ethical issues that gave rise to the debate still are very much in play, ED experts say.
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Three hospital EDs in Binghamton, NY, overcame late June floodwaters that caused one of them to close by sharing staff and other resources to enable the remaining two to function with increased caseloads until operations returned to normal.
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These disasters showed how severely clinical operations can be affected in health care organizations that lose their electrical power, and they have led the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations to issue a Sentinel Event Alert.
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Patient satisfaction improvement projects can be a significant challenge for an ED manager, says Marcia Abernathy, RN, director of emergency services at Saint Francis Medical Center in Cape Girardeau, MO.
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It probably was inevitable, given the call coverage crisis in this country. Now that it has happened, emergency medicine experts are sitting up and taking notice...
