I, personally, would like to see ERs go back to treating emergencies and turn away the petty.
I realize that not everything that seems petty IS petty, as seen by your examples above, but some ARE petty and should not be taking up the ERs time and resources.
Can't do it...for a number of reasons.Perhaps the most important of which is that the 1 of 500 "heartburn" patients that you might turn away would turn out to be having an MI (heart attack)...would die....and the family would sue,sue,SUE.
I disagree that it makes it better to have someone show they “care.”
It makes it better, but it’s not sufficient. The ER is broken and it’s because it is full of non-emergency cases.
I don’t want someone to “care.” I want to be efficiently screened for an emergency, told the results and then released if I don’t want to hang around for hours until some doctor or nurse tells me to “rest, drink plenty of fluids, and take motrin as needed.”
When I take my child in because he possibly has a broken arm, I don’t care if one person there “cares.” It’s very easy to determine if he has a broken bone. If he does, then we’ll wait for treatment. If he doesn’t, we’re out of there. An x-ray and reading the x-ray takes five minutes-—in five minutes, we could be in and out of there-—because, if his bone is not broken, I don’t need anyone to tell me how to take care of my child’s boo-boo.
Yet we wait and wait for hours and hours, while people who have nonspecific complaints, for which the doctor may “want” to do zillions of tests, languish in the back.
Anyway, I ranted on the original thread, so will step off here.
People don’t need to understand triage better. They understand triage very well. They understand the reason for the delays in the ER. THEY JUST DON’T AGREE THAT WE CANNOT DO BETTER.