Consider this: Avoid, if at all possible, using the ER as a primary care venue. Try as best you can to schedule doctor office visits well in advance. Also, choose doctors, if possible, whose schedules are more open, even if it means driving extra distances. Consider telemedicine options and email to get care , if your doctor or insurance company offers that. Be very specific when talking to the triage nurse about the severity of your symptoms. This is crucial in proper and more rapid allocation of care.
Always carry your essential information —insurance card, brief medical history, a list of medications and allergies and sensitivities with you so there are no delays when you go to the ER. Have a patient advocate , a spouse, family member or friend , who can assist you, if possible, in dealing with the process. I mean this—this is not a joke!
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Go Against the Grain. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Join Us Now. Sign up for our newsletter Email. Minute after minute, hour after hour, you wait anxiously for your name to be called as you wait in the hospital emergency room. But besides the number of patients, what causes such long delays in hospital emergency rooms? Here are 7 causes for this overwhelmingly widespread problem:. Therefore, we expect emergency care centers to be the same.
However, emergency rooms use a different method to serve patients. The higher degree of urgency, the quicker a patient is admitted. A patient with a minor symptom, such as a small cut or burn, can expect to wait behind those with higher degrees of urgency, such as heart pain symptoms or major trauma.
While this can be frustrating, it helps the emergency room staff assist those requiring immediate treatment quicker and even saves lives. Another contributing factor to long ER wait times is the time it takes to diagnose each patient. Emergency physicians must first rule out life-threatening conditions and then possibly administer blood tests, X-rays, CT scans and other lab work, depending on the illness or injury.
This number is an indication of how many patients emergency room physicians can serve at once. While most cases end in same-day discharge or transfer to a different department, some patients require prolonged boarding times.
If all hospital beds are full, it prevents the staff from attending to other patients coming in. One universal complaint among patients today is that the wait to be seen or the time one stays in the emergency rooms of hospitals is so long.
This has been an issue for a while but it appears to be getting worse. First understand that emergency rooms ERs , also called emergency departments EDs and emergency wards EWs , are a microcosm of the health care system. Also know that 70 percent to 80 percent of hospitalized patients come in through the ER. That is a huge number. There are so many factors that are at play in delays related to this area of the hospital it is hard to know where to begin. These are all major factors as to why ERs are so overcrowded, understaffed and full of waits and delays.
Another factor is that hospital beds are in demand, and in order to admit a patient to the hospital, a bed must be made available. This does not always occur in a regularly smooth way, and delays are inevitable.
When one realizes that in a given community, one-quarter of the population in any given year will visit the ER as a patient, it is not difficult to see why access to timely ER visits is a problem.
In high tourism areas the number increases to one-third of the population.
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