It is common to find patients waiting for admission sitting in the hallways of emergency departments.
A new study suggests there is no harm in transferring them upstairs to the floor, where they can wait in the hallways there.
The sight of waiting patients on a medical floor would put pressure on the administration to open up rooms, and transfer the patient’s care to the floor nurses. Predictably, they are resisting the idea:
But nurses and government regulators have resisted, citing safety issues, “as though the emergency department hallway is a safer environment,” he said in frustration.
This is a turf war more than anything else.
Lost is the fact that much of the wait for hospital beds is due to nurse staffing issues. It would be more effective for hospitals to hire nurses than to play this game of musical hallways.
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- Dying in the waiting room
- Waiting hours to see a doctor, and patients billing physicians for lost time
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{ 1 comment }
Sometimes there are simply no beds to transfer the patient to. You can hire all the nurses you want, but you typically can’t make more patient rooms.
If ICU is full and ER has patients for us, there is simply nowhere to go. We try to call the docs to get transfer orders, but they’re busy up on the floors trying to discharge patients.
And even when patients get their discharge orders, there’s still usually the issue of getting someone to pick them up. “Sure, my son/daughter can come get me after they leave work at 5pm.”
Well, that doesn’t help at 9am.
It is definitely a multi-faceted problem.
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