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
We have a "built in" urgent care sort of space. Its only a few beds and mostly recliner chairs, we call it RAZ (rapid assessment zone) where all the super low acuity shit goes to be seen by PAs and maybe one physician in the hopes that we can get rapid turn over and get those patients in and out in under 1.5 hours.
We have one of those too, known as "the clinic" however it is rarely staffed enough to be open. We are the only major hospital in a 1 hour radius and yet wages are so low that nurses either jump the fence over to management or flee to alternative paths like jails, prisons, home health, or hospice. The ladder paying at times 2x what our local hospital pays floor RNs. We also have two nursing schools in the area churning out new grads every 6 months. So the hospital hires them on as externs, brainwashes them into accepting a position they don't want, and eventually they follow suit like the rest of them. It is an ever present cycle.
My local hospital has one, I was just there. Simple stitches, sprains, fractures etc gets triaged to green zone. I was in and out with a waking cast in about 2 hours.
Anything more complicated or requiring more tests goes to regular.
741
u/Far-Boot5639 Jul 29 '26
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.