Emergency Rooms
Filed Under Right Medical Facility |
The emergency room has become the “physician” for many patients. Patients who cannot find a physician at night, or who don’t know where else to go are coming to emergency rooms with increased frequency. The typical emergency room is now filled with nonemergency cases. Trivial illnesses which could have been treated with the aid of this book, routine problems more easily and economically handled in a physician’s office, specialized problems which should have been seen at a time when the hospital facilities were fully available, and true emergencies are all mixed together. Even though the emergency room is not designed for the purpose it now serves, it does a surprisingly good job of delivering adequate care.
However, there are major disadvantages to an emergency room as the sole medical contact. Emergency rooms make little or no provision for continued care. In the emergency room you will usually be seen by different physicians. The emergency room physician will attend to the chief problem reported by the patient but seldom has sufficient time to complete a full examination or to deal with underlying problems. While simple x-ray facilities are available, procedures such as gallbladder studies and upper G.I. series are arranged with difficulty. Thus, evaluation of a complicated problem is not well handled by the emergency room. When a true emergency occurs, patients with less urgent problems are shunted to the end of the line. You cannot estimate with any certainty how long it will take you to be seen in an emergency room. Emergency room fees, because they support equipment required to handle true emergencies, are higher than those of standard office visits. Emergency room services are not always covered by medical insurance, even when the policy states that the costs of emergency care are included. With many policies, the nature of the illness governs whether or not it is covered. You may end up paying a large bill if you go to the emergency room with a sore throat.
The smoothly functioning emergency room is a dramatic place and provides one of the finest examples of a service profession at work. Using the procedures outlined in this book, you can use this valuable resource appropriately