ED Wait Times

[ambodriver]

I usually get into a room immediately, most times I place patients in the waiting room and give the triage RN a heads up.

When I worked on the privates we could wait an hour or so. Pretty stupid.

[triemal04]

Once we are on hospital property, the patient is technically the hospital's patient. We are waiting inside a hallway of the ER for a room, the only equipment we have with us is the cardiac monitor (which some supervisors encouraged us to turn off once we had been triaged and were just waiting for a room, to "show" the hospital the patient was their responsibility... I refused to do that). We were not allowed to further treat the patient, as they were no longer "our" patient, and as the patient was not in an ER room and being seen by a dr, the hospital would not treat them either. On 1 call I was able to give my waiting pt additional pain medication that I had left over in the vial (was going to waste) with permission from the attending Dr, but this was an exception, not at all the norm. If we had fluids or anything running we would continue that while waiting, but not start anything new. Now typically we were not kept waiting with "critical" patients, however on occasion we have been (such as the a-fib w/ RVR patient, another patient on CPAP... both of these were at the same hospital)

Believe me, I know how bad for patient care this sounds, thats why I got out of that system as soon as possible (started my new job this month!)

Dear god that's ridiculous. Good on you for getting out of that system.

Out of curiousity, do you know what the reasoning behind that was? Was it to try and force the ER's to take over care quicker because you routinely were being parked in the hall, or some other reason?