Comments | emmycantbemeeko: Thanks, CNN! This is totally what people need to know!

emmycantbemeeko

Thanks, CNN! This is totally what people need to know!

Jun 25, 2009 11:16

How to be an entitled asshole in the ER: A special report by CNNRemember, folks, if you successfully line jump after triage, you're shoving in front of someone a medical professional has already determined to be in more serious condition than you are ( Read more... )

Comments 12

misscrankypants June 25 2009, 16:41:07 UTC

Wow. Just wow. People are such ASSHOLES! Me! Me! Me! It's all about me! Sorry about that broken bone or burst appendix, I HAVE A RASH AND MUST BE SEEN NOW!!!!!

If I were the check-in person I'd say, "call him up. If he wants to talk to me I'm happy to do so." Fucking bitch. Hopefully the president of the hospital is not a fucking moron.

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emmycantbemeeko June 25 2009, 18:43:30 UTC

It's not so much that it's irritating from my end- I have to deal with all the patients eventually regardless of the order in which they're seen, and a patient being an asshole to me just means that I do my job competently but not especially sweetly. They're just shooting themselves in the foot, generally. I absolutely agree with the doctor's comments in that article that linejumping leads to lower-quality care for the linejumper, because it evades the systems that protect a patient.

(the only time I have ever made trouble in an ER was when they had overflow and put me and my not seriously ill child and another mom and her very very seriously ill child in the hall outside a man who presumably had active TB and kept wandering out of his containment room and coughing on us) but yeah, if I thought that the staff was blowing me off, or just too overworked, or if I thought being in the ER was itself a risk

Those are all reasonable situations in which to make a fuss- if you've really been misordered in the wait and it's blazingly obvious ( ... )

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emmycantbemeeko June 25 2009, 21:45:41 UTC

This is very, very true. I've always believed it, but now that I work in the medical field I believe it in a much more vivid way.

millysdaughter June 25 2009, 18:51:34 UTC

Well, when I took the young son into the military hospital ER after his bike accident, they booted a full Colonel that was actively having a heart attack OUT of the room to treat the kid.
If you get bumped out of your place in line, the ER doc has a very good reason.
He had a ruptured spleen and spent the next 10 days unconscious in the ICU, but to "look" at him if you were another person sitting and waiting, you would not have been able to "tell" that he was that critical. **I** did not realize he was that critical at first.
Save the tick bite and funny rash for normal duty hours, kthnxbi.

cubes June 25 2009, 20:42:29 UTC

I might be an entitled asshole. I do flash my VIP card when I walk in the door, but I don't threaten to call anybody, and I have a pretty good idea of what's emergent and what's not anyway. (I apologized, and still feel mildly guilty, for taking my son in with a possible broken finger, but the doc's office and urgent care didn't open for several hours yet and he was in quite a bit of pain initially and I couldn't figure out how to home splint a tiny wiggly 18 month old finger such that he wouldn't just tear it off 2 minutes later).

BUT

Triage nurses do make mistakes, and hives after an insect bite are not something I'd fuck around with for a three hour wait. Then again, if I really thought it might be anaphylaxis, I would have called an ambulance to begin with... I am of the general opinion that if you can get to the ER without an ambulance, you probably don't really need to be in the ER (and if you do really need to be in the ER, you shouldn't try to get there without an ambulance ( ... )

emmycantbemeeko June 25 2009, 20:52:53 UTC

As you will see if you read my above comments, I have no problem with people being upset and demanding it be fixed if they or their loved one is actually misdiagnosed. Frankly, though, if one can't figure out that that's appropriate or how to go about it without a how-to article, one probably isn't a very good judge of diagnostic ability. I've had people complain that their lunch tray was late during a code on the same hallway- most people are really really bad at prioritizing their problems realistically when in competition for limited resources with other people's problems ( ... )

cubes June 26 2009, 00:22:41 UTC

Yeah, I guess I forget that people in general are selfish idiots. Sucks.

cubes June 25 2009, 20:50:09 UTC

Also, here's my plug for (part of) my solution the "the health care crisis": Find your local free/sliding scale/voluntary donation medical clinic. Give them money. Give them time. Give them whatever you can, and help them take care of the poor, the uninsured, the people who are clogging up the ER with non-emergent problems because it's the only place they can afford to go and/or because they can't afford to take care of their chronic health conditions until they hit a crisis.

emmycantbemeeko June 25 2009, 20:54:25 UTC

This is already part of my life plan for once I'm professionally and financially able to do so.

cubes June 26 2009, 00:19:01 UTC

At our clinic, volunteer nurses are not required to hold active nursing licenses (if you can take a pulse and a history, and you HAVE a pulse, you're in :-). The State of Florida does have some wonderfully sensible policies when it comes to clinics that serve a certain income level -- docs' malpractice is covered under state sovereign immunity, retired physicians can get a limited license to volunteer w/out all of the active practice requirements, med room (for patients only) doesn't require a registered pharmacist on staff, etc. etc ( ... )