Emergency Room Nursing

Emergency Care Nursing Emergency rooms are known for their long waits and lack of competent staff. Over the past years emergency care departments have revamped their systems in order to correct these flaws. A leading factor in this change is the presence of more nursing staff on the floor of the emergency room. Nurses have gone from having little power when it comes to patient diagnoses, to running their own non-life-threatening treatment facilities. Without these men and women emergency care would continue to be inefficient. Nurses started out in emergency rooms as the front person who had the patient fill out paperwork and asked him or her a few questions before having the patient wait even longer to see a doctor. “[Nurses] told doctors what patients needed but they had little autonomy; everything they did had to be signed off by doctors” (Dean, 2011, p. 6). Nurses did not have much power when it came to diagnosis ad treatment. This was a main reason for the huge back up in waiting rooms. Nurses were often frustrated because after they assessed a patient a junior doctor went through the same steps they had gone through, usually coming to the same diagnosis and treatment plan. “Doctors usually made the same diagnosis the nurse had already made” (Dean, 2011, p. 6). It has been shown that emergency nurse practitioners (ENP) often provide safer care than doctors. A study of 1,453 patients at North General Hospital found that nurse practitioner’s patients were less likely to return to the hospital compared to patients of doctors. This is due to the more accurate nurses notes taken by the ENP (Dean, 2011). Nurses in the past were not trained in the treatment of traumatic injuries. This made it difficult for them to properly assess trauma patients. Nurses could not move quickly or efficiently with these types of patients. As time has gone on nursing schools and training has adapted to fill this gap. Nurses now are taking

References: Dean, E. (2012). Promoting best practice in urgent care. Emergency Nurse, 20(1), 6-8.