Susan Martin24 said:Look, you can't just stand out in the hallway doing triage—nobody would take you seriously, and I guess unspecified is right here 😘
That might work in a war zone, but if you want to run a real clinic, you have to actually examine and log every single patient who walks through the door. We’re talking dozens of people every day, so yeah, the wait times get crazy... you can't just wrap everything up in three minutes...
there wasn't time for triage, but there was plenty of time to basically tell people to beat it and go to another hospital, huh? 😉
I mean, if dozens of "wrong" patients show up at one ER clinic every single day, and a huge chunk of them don't even need emergency care, wouldn't it be a genius idea to have a reception desk staffed by an intern (or better yet, a trained nurse)? *okay, look, I don't know exactly how much specialized knowledge is required or what the official hierarchy is, so please don't correct my terminology* —but they could act as a sort of triage. That would, like, A) take the load off the doctors; B) speed up the whole line so people who actually need help get seen faster; and C) help those folks who otherwise end up sitting in a waiting room for four hours just because they needed some Tylenol
Or maybe even phone triage is a decent fix? (Though, honestly, that didn't really help when my grandma was sick, even though it worked perfectly for my grandpa thanks to the instructions from the guys at the ER, which meant the ambulance didn't have to come out)
What doctors really need to wrap their heads around is that patients—regular folks (even those who think they know something but are totally wrong)—are in pain, they don't know what's wrong, and being scared is just a totally normal reaction. When people are scared, we all know they get tunnel vision, so it's totally expected that they'll head to the only place they know: the ER.
So, like, that desk I was talking about could
- tell one patient over the phone, who's had diarrhea since this morning but isn't vomiting, that it's just a standard stomach bug and to (if they don't feel better) hit up their regular doctor tomorrow
- tell another person who has a massive fever and a killer sore throat despite taking meds to head to an infectious disease clinic instead of trauma...
- tell a third person that it's totally normal for their first period after ovarian surgery to be super painful and that they shouldn't panic...
And all of that would just relieve the pressure on
the main ER
emergency admissions
the healthcare system in general