Hospitals, MDs Addressing Long Wait Times

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Hospitals, MDs Addressing Long Wait Times

LINDSEY TANNER
AP Medical Writer

Beatrice Vance died of a heart attack. The coroner says waiting in the emergency room helped kill her.

The 49-year-old woman's chest was tight with pain when she walked into the ER at Vista East Medical Center in Waukegan last July. A blood clot had lodged in her heart.

It was 10:15 p.m. when Vance checked in, a coroner's report shows. But she was told to wait for a doctor. So she sat and waited. And waited. And then at 12:25 a.m., she collapsed, her heart starved of blood flow.

Doctors rushed to treat her, but she had no pulse. It was too late.

Her wait, the coroner said, lasted two hours and 10 minutes.

---Rest HERE: http://www.emsresponder.com/article/article.jsp?id=4382&siteSection=1 ---
 
The hospitals we transport to take chest pain and difficulty breathing VERY seriously. It's a shame not every hospital does, apparently.
 
Our local hospital is NOT EQUIPPED to handle any cardiac emergency aside from cardiac arrest and the occasion case of angina, but anything more severe must be transported 30-45 minutes away to a cardiac care center.

The wait time at our ER is also pretty bad too, even if you come in by EMS you tend to wait an hour for the MD to visit you, but you get a slew of nurses when you walk in the door.

The exception to this is if you come in and are blue, gray, or intubated!
 
All of the ED's I've spent time in (From standalone urgent-care type to Level I Trauma Center) have taken someone walking in the door and complaining of chest pain VERY seriously. They almost always get fast-tracked to go into the ED, and get assessed very quickly after coming back.

Walking in the door to the local ED and saying you are having chest pain gets you 2 things - #1 You get a bed before the "finger laceration." #2 You get a REALLY expensive bill.
 
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Jon said:
All of the ED's I've spent time in (From standalone urgent-care type to Level I Trauma Center) have taken someone walking in the door and complaining of chest pain VERY seriously. They almost always get fast-tracked to go into the ED, and get assessed very quickly after coming back.
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My experience is the same. I worked in a small rural ER where there were only 2 nurses and and a Doc on overnight on the weekends. They hired me to pick up the slack. Any chest pain or respiratory distress was treated seriously. The issue we had was getting that information back to the caregivers from the front desk clerk when the 4 of us were hopping with 10 patients.

I could see a chest pain waiting some on a busy day before the medical staff even heard about it.
 
This really surprises me too. The hospitals in our area take chest pain pretty serious too. You start complaining of chest pain and you'll get seen pretty quick. Now if it turns out to be nothing, THEN you may have to wait awile, but initial assessment is quick.
 
Something similar happened recently at the hospital I work at... An older lady (in her 50's I believe) came in complaining of nausea/vomiting xseveral days. She had a resting pulse rate of 150 when she was triaged and we had placed her on O2 secondary to some slight diff breathing and really bad asthma. She came in at aprox 1430 at aprox 1900 she told me she really felt like she needed a breathing treatment and thanked me for being so nice to her all afternoon. I went and told the triage nurse that she felt like she needed a breathing tx and she in turn told the charge nurse the same. The charge nurse looked at her and told her she didnt have a bed which wasnt true it would have just involved her taking care of 2 pts rather than 1 if she had brought the woman back to one of the closed beds(beds were closed due to being short staffed). I walked back out to the waiting area about 1910 and i found the lady laid back in her wheel chair grey pulseless and not breathing. Its sad to say that it took that happening for her to get a bed and for out hospital to make some changes in the way things are done. Unfortunatly even though we gave our best efforts once she coded we were to late to save her.
 
The national standard of waiting time in ER is now over 4 hours before being seen by a physician. This is not unusual and has actually become the national standard in which most ER's are judged by. They expect by the end of 2008, to increase to a 5-6 hour duration, due to the growth in numbers, non-emergency patients, geriatric increasing and so on.

The article is a piss poorly written article. Did she come into ER with chest pain, or did she come in with gastric pain, vertigo, etc..? All that might potentially indicate other disease processes. Was there treatment prior to physician evaluation? True, she might not had been seen by a physician and I do agree, she should had been seen earlier, but doubtful she would had survived anyway.

The usual H & P is performed by the triage, then ER nurse, then EKG, lab's way before it is reviewed by the physician attention. Unless someone demonstrates a "precursor" of an AMI, most physicians are not alerted for every sick and ill patient, otherwise nothing would ever get done.

Appears to me the AP writer has a sidekick with a local attorney, and did not report all the facts, just pointing the finger.

R/r 911
 
The article is a piss poorly written article.
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well then, there's an internet full of related info...

how many articles about our failing health care system would you like Ryder ?

~S~
 
I thought you believed it was "not broke"...

What I described there was no details, such as initial care and treatment, previous history, onset of pain or even if patient described having chest pain PTA... You see, I see patients nearly everyday, sometimes between 20 to 40 myself, so I can understand both sides.


I agree, the medical care in the U.S. is messed up. From uneducated people expecting medical care for every ache and pain to antiquated EMS and long waiting times in ER due to too many patients and not enough admission rooms. We have yet reached the tip of iceberg of problems.....

R/r911
 
I thought you believed it was "not broke"...
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depneds what part of health care we speak of Ryder

I see ems as the least broke because it is the most available for this country's citizenry

let those same factors in that have obviously had such detrimental effects on everything we see upstairs from ems (so to speak) , and you'll create the same problems for ems

~S~
 
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