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You are working on a busy summer Friday night when you get a medic call on the radio that you will be receiving three children from the same motor vehicle crash (MVC). There was moderate damage to the vehicle, airbags did deploy, and there were no fatalities at the scene. Five minutes later, you have the following patients, in full spinal precautions, in your ED:
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If a psychiatric patient is being sent home, the EP must determine if there is proper follow-up available for that patient, which means connecting the patient with appropriate resources, says Leslie Zun, MD, MBA, professor and chair in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital and Chicago (IL) Medical School.
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Whether a patient sues after learning an initially normal finding was re-read as abnormal has something to do with how the emergency physician (EP) approaches the situation.
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A young man presented to an emergency department (ED) and reported hallucinations after taking over-the-counter herbal stimulants and diphenhydramine. The ED diagnosis was acute psychosis resolved.
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As part of the workup for a young woman with abdominal pain, the emergency physician (EP) ordered radiographic studies of the patients abdomen, and general surgery and OB/GYN consults. The on-call radiologist first read the studies as unremarkable.
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he courts dont always agree with or follow the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services interpretation that EMTALA ends once an emergency department patient with an emergency condition is admitted to the hospital in good faith for stabilizing treatment.
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In the intense focus of late on use of the ED by patients with non-emergent needs, it is perhaps easy to overlook another group of patients that is strongly linked with the ED: patients who are nearing the end of life.
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On any given day, the ED at Mercy Hospital in Springfield, MO, has two zone captains acting as mini-charge nurses, for the east and west sides of the department. There is also an up-front triage nurse who is the first person most patients see when they walk in the door, and a lobby nurse who regularly rounds through the waiting room, taking vital signs and monitoring patients who have yet to see a provider.
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As demand for emergency care continues its upward climb, The Joint Commission is taking steps to strengthen its accreditation standards pertaining to patient throughput, and it is putting hospital leaders on notice that they will be held accountable for patient flow challenges that occur in the ED.
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