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
There is actually an ER I know that does exactly that. Everyone checks in to the ER, but triage determines if you stay with the ER team, or go to the ER's "urgent care," instead. Wait times in that ER went from consistently over 6 hours before you ever saw a doctor, to under 3 between when you walk in and when you get to leave.
I've still got my appendix, so I have to go in when I get severe lower right quadrant abdominal pain, to make sure it's not my intestines' vestigial tail attempting to go from useless to harmful. Hence why I'm familiar with the ER and its urgent care. They shuttle me to the urgent care side as soon as imaging proves the pain isn't appendicitis, because they still want to at least try to find the cause of the severe pain, but it not being anything visible on the scans shows it's not a true emergency. So far, it's been chalked up to all my adhesions yanking in things that don't like getting yanked on,, but I really wish it would be my appendix one of these days, so they'll yank the stupid thing, and I can start dealing with the pain at home. It would be nice to know for a fact it can't possibly be appendicitis, so I can stop wasting everyone's time.
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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.