Wednesday, October 22, 2008

No Room In the Inn

This may be an everyday occurance in some ERs, but for us, it is pretty rare to have more than 4 or 5 admissions pending at a time.  Despite having an abnormally large ER for a small hospital (There are less than four times as many inpatient beds as ER beds - meaning that for a large 400 bed hospital they would need to have a 100+ bed ER to be equivalent), we usually get patients through within a few hours.

But on this day, things on the floor just weren't going very well and we were backed up like I've never seen.  This picture was taken before part of the ER was open, but of the 19 non-fast track beds that were open, 11 were being admitted.  Two of those admits were my patients (one a Korean-speaking chest pain - talk about lost in translation!).

Compare this to yesterday while I was in Triage and saw maybe 10 admissions all day.

And I don't remember taking this picture at 12:17 am.  More likely it was 12:17 pm and my clock was not calibrated correctly.



1 comment:

oneday said...

Oh wow, I am an ER Tech at a fairly busy ER. We will see about 150 in one day admit up to 35 of those and have at least 5 ICU holds that our staff must take care of as well as their other patients. Your board looks beautiful. I am jealous.