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While assessing a 40-year-old male who complained of abdominal pain, nurses did a routine mental health screening, which included asking if he was currently suicidal. "He answered 'yes' to all of the questions," says MaryEllen Swanson, RN, a senior staff nurse in the ED at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. "It would have been missed if the screening had not been done."
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If a tuberculosis patient just left your ED to go to a negative pressure room, housekeeping must come and disinfect the room wearing full contact precautions garb, leave the room unused for four hours, and remove all hanging curtains and replace these with clean ones.
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Every part of the process in stroke care from the time the patient begins to have symptoms to the time treatment is initiated is constantly examined for ways to cut minutes, reports Sharon Pulver, MSN, RN, CEN, network stroke coordinator for the SSM Neurosciences Institute in St. Louis, MO.
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Children are more susceptible to acute airway compromise due to the unique characteristics of a child's airway, according to Eileen Callahan, RN, BSN, an ED pediatric nurse educator at Tufts Medical Center and the Floating Hospital for Children in Boston, MA.
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If the patient standing in front of you appears jittery, unable to sit still, and is continually scratching at sores on his or her face and body, it's likely he or she is using methamphetamine. "It's unfortunate to say, but we can usually tell by looking at someone that he or she is a meth user," says Sue Williams, RN, a nurse with SSM Behavioral Health Services at St. Joseph Health Center-Wentzville in Wentzville, MO.
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Agreeing to settle a plaintiff's claim alleging ED malpractice may not sound like a good idea to the emergency physician (EP) named in the lawsuit, but, in fact, this course of action is often in everybody's best interest.
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Generally speaking, when an emergency physician (EP) loses a trial, it may take him or her a long time to recover personally, psychologically, and emotionally. "But with a few rather glaring exceptions, the public is unaware of that in large measure," according to Joseph P. McMenamin, MD, JD, FCLM, a partner at Richmond, VA-based McGuireWoods and a former practicing EP.
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The vast majority of emergency nurses, during their entire career, will never be involved in a lawsuit, even as a witness, much less as a named defendant, according to Edie Brous, RN, Esq., a New York City-based nurse attorney. "There are many misperceptions about liability exposure," she says. "Although the fear of liability has increased, actual lawsuits, in fact, have not."
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Plaintiff attorneys continue efforts to turn ordinary "failure to diagnose" malpractice claims into claims for "failure to provide an appropriate medical screening exam" under federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act EMTALA.
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Under what circumstances might a plaintiff's team be willing to drop the emergency physician (EP) involved in a lawsuit and allow the hospital to settle with the patient?
