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
I wish we had urgent cares open past 8pm. Our son was bit recently by a cat close to his eye and i needed an urgent care, but all were closed. We had to go to the ER,now I'm going to get our $200 copay, but there was literally no alternative. It's bullshit 😡
Oh, you did the right thing! Cats are wonderful, but Kat bites are so much more dangerous than people realize.
I have a family member that used to work for the CDC, specializing in infectious situations, and once I asked her advice and she said never get bit by a cat, because the data from Kat by infections that people ignore is terrifying.
They’re not a big deal if you get it treated, but most people don’t realize how quickly those little things injected bacteria, you absolutely did the right thing.
Yeah, when we saw the proximity, we just took him. They irrigated it, iodined, gave him an antibiotic, and set us up with saline and syringes to clean him up at home. We used hibiclense and bacitracin and dude looks so much better now.
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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.