Stuck on the wall

Frozennoodle

Frozennoodle

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2 hours and counting. What do you guys do to pass the time?
 
Frozennoodle said:
2 hours and counting. What do you guys do to pass the time?
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I play pointless games on my iPad (Tesla Wars, Angry Birds, Air Hockey), watch Netflix, and read.
 
I'm at a level 1 trauma center an there is a gsw coming in on a helicopter so that should be cool to gawk at for a minute or two.
 
Read books. Lots of them. The library knows me very well.
 
Convince/justify with the help of all the local EMS agencies/transfer services that the hospital should start employing medics to receive your patient.

They did this in Orlando and other places...you hand off care and the medic babysits them which returns you to service.

If the hospital does not buy off on this, then convince your employer to do what other agencies did prior to the hospital agreeing to above arrangement.

The agencies simply hired an extra person to stage at the hospital and take over babysitting which again frees up the crew.

One salary of a day time person to free up a unit/units to go make more money, more than justifies the expense.
 
Alternative, and this works for the IFT transports, simply refuse to transport to hospitals that are chronically bad like that. My first company did that to one and it got a lot better, but only for a while.
 
Am I missing something?

What does "Stuck on the wall" mean? I honestly can't tell you what I do to pass the time when I'm stuck on the wall because I don't know what that expression means.
 
JJR512 said:
Am I missing something?

What does "Stuck on the wall" mean? I honestly can't tell you what I do to pass the time when I'm stuck on the wall because I don't know what that expression means.
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I'm not sure either... if they're talking about waiting to drop a patient off... longest I've EVER waited was 20 minutes.
 
In Orlando and other similar sized or larger cities you can wait hours during peak season.

The plan I mentioned above started when times were hitting the 4 hour mark and this is for 911 crews, not IFT.
 
akflightmedic said:
In Orlando and other similar sized or larger cities you can wait hours during peak season.

The plan I mentioned above started when times were hitting the 4 hour mark and this is for 911 crews, not IFT.
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The main hospital in my area is great/horrible.

It's great because you can give report to any nurse in the triage area (there are about 5), and they never even look at the patient, or paperwork.

It's horrible for the same reason. If something were to happen with the patient, they'd have no idea what was going on with the patient.
 
"Stuck on the wall" having to baby sit a patient at the hospital until a bed frees up. I wound up spending three an a half hours waiting for a bed.

This was also a level 1 trauma center in New Orleans on MLK day.

An it's a charity hospital so any indigent patients dont have to pay.
 
longest wait was 6 hours, at MLK in South Central, AKA Killer King. 4 is not a surprise, at least some hospitals will just send us out to the waiting room to drop off our bls patients. gotta love LA.
 
the ED staff in my town usually accepts patients in the hallways and takes over care even so...we even write in our reports that the nursing staff confirmed the patient was assumed in ED care, not in ours.
 
Frozennoodle said:
"Stuck on the wall" having to baby sit a patient at the hospital until a bed frees up. I wound up spending three an a half hours waiting for a bed.
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That is wrong! Does this happen often?

As for passing the time, I could not tell you honestly. Waiting any longer than 20 minutes at my hospital is unheard of!
 
We have Touro, East Jeff, West Jeff, Oschner main, Oschner West Bank, Oschner Kenner, Oschner Baptist Tulane, Childrens, University, and Slidell Memorial as ER drop off points with another 3 hospitals planned or under construction and we still have some long wait times in our area. We have around 1.4 million people being served across the metro area and my company operates all across the city so our wait times can get pretty hairy. I've heard of people waiting 6 hours and one story where they had a 10 hour wait time but that was before a lot of the hospitals re-opened and the trauma center was in a tiny little hospital. We are a very small city though I'm sure some of the guys in LA and NYC have some interesting stuff as it relates to wait times.

And yeah, 1-3 hour wait times happen pretty often. Usually when a non-critical patient wants to go to a busy ER. Last week I waited 2 hours with a patient.
 
I've never waited more than a reasonable number of minutes for the staff to make some room, and I've never ever waited with a patient who was actually sick.

What do you guys do with patients who have actual problems while you wait for 6 hours? Why don't they run them through triage? I can not imagine waiting all that time.
 
Sometimes if it's close to the end of the shift dispatch will send a night truck out to sit so you can go home or if there are two patients from two crews in one ER one crew will take both patients and free up the other crew. Most of the time we just wait it out. I get paid by the hour so it's whatever. If that's what my company wants to pay me to do I have plenty of school work and reading to do lol.
 
abckidsmom said:
I've never waited more than a reasonable number of minutes for the staff to make some room, and I've never ever waited with a patient who was actually sick.

What do you guys do with patients who have actual problems while you wait for 6 hours? Why don't they run them through triage? I can not imagine waiting all that time.
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they start care on my gurney. had a breather on cpap for an hour before transfered to the hospital bed. out here the hospitals are just full, all the beds are full. with a max patient load of 5 patients per nurse sometimes there is just no place to put them. I read, some places have computers and tvs. take turns watching the patient with your partner.
 
Wow. I feel privileged now. The longest I can recall waiting for a bed is about a half hour. I've never had to wait with a critical patient. Just wow. I'm amazed.
 
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