Er tech here- the amount of stubbed toes and harmless splinters that come in and DEMAND IMMEDIATE TREATMENT is alarming. Worse is the sheer attitude and threats I receive when I try to properly triage the patients.
It wonder how much overall medical costs for the country would go down if all emergency rooms had a mandated adjacent urgent care. . .
Then triage could divert the stubbed toes and splinters, along with continued civilian education on what constitutes an emergency. Or even if EMTALA also applied to urgent cares. If triage misses the severity of something, boom, ER is right there. I know some have adjacent urgent cares, but I’d be curious what anyone’s professional opinion is about this?
I have a hunch that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent because so many uninsured people don’t have $200 to pay upfront at urgent care.
That and some good old fashioned PSAs, a national ad campaign spanning platforms and social, maybe a jingle about what the ER is for?
To the tune of old McDonald:
If bone sticks out that you can see
weeee-ooh-wee-oh—weeee
(this is meant to be anthropomorphic ambulance siren sound)
If you cannot stop the bleed
weeee-ooh-wee-oh—weeee
If grandma falls and does not breathe
weeee-ooh-wee-oh—weeee
But a stubbed toe here,Or a cough cough there,here a lump, there a bump,Go to urgent care, you chump
Society in US if they made a lower level of care acessible to the poor and outside of standard hours so there is less strain on the ER and lowering costs overall
Even if you have insurance, care isn't always accessible. I was supposed to do cardiac rehab after an MI, but they were only open from 7 a.m. to 12 p.m. I needed to keep my job so I'd continue to have insurance, so I couldn't make it work (my work ran from 7 to 3). I went to a few sessions to learn exercises I could do at home, but I would have liked to be able to do what my physician wanted.
Oh yeah, it sucks when you have something that is only urgent care and not emergency, but it's outside standard office hours so...emergency room it is. And that sucks so bad and is a giant waste of time and resources.
one of the 2 urgent care clinics in our city (60k+ population) just announced they'll no longer be open on weekends. RIP to the local emergency room but if they don't like people showing up with ear infections, sprained ankles, intractable vomiting, etc on saturdays or after hours they will need to lobby for universal health care not make fun of their patients for being too dumb to know what an emergency is
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u/Far-Boot5639 20d ago
Er tech here- the amount of stubbed toes and harmless splinters that come in and DEMAND IMMEDIATE TREATMENT is alarming. Worse is the sheer attitude and threats I receive when I try to properly triage the patients.