woman dies in ER waiting room (article)

Wow. That is awful. Its too bad.

I pray I will never become hardened to a patients pain. I have had it drilled into my head pain it what the patient says it is. I hope to always remember this.

You are absolutely right! and I hope that I dont harden to a patients pain either.

Here's a link to the ER thread.

http://allnurses.com/forums/f18/sacr...se-224869.html

I want to point out that my posts may offend many, but I wrote them in all honesty. Let's talk to each other, and avoid a flamefest.

Well, I certainly don't see how they could just let her lay there in front of all the other patients, rolling around on the floor....no, not right, whether they believed her or not, how could that happen? And. yes. the ER nurses at our hospital often have this attitude and once yelled at me when I was trying to give report on a patient we were sending them from our LTC facility. She was having extreme abdominal pain and had a history of panceatitis. She said, "Well, it's 1:30 in the morning! How long has she been in pain!!!!!" Well, excuse me, I thought, I will try to schedule my patients pain at a more convenient time for you! She arrived at the ER with her husband and they would not even let them in saying they were on by-pass right at that very moment. The hospital is accross the street from us. She went to another hospital and was admittted right away with acute pancreatitis.

there is too much missing information in this article. where i work we will triage a frequent flier 20x's if we have to. its the law and it's also an EMTALA violation if everything they say happened is correct. i have worked in substandard treatment hospitals before as agency and i won't go back because the morale is so low and you feel like your license is on the line everyday. this will be a huge lawsuit. if i were the ED nurse working in that triage, i would prepare for a career change.

I do not work in the ED- but just like everyone else I have an opinion. ED nurses do have to have a toughness to them because they do see a lot of drug seekers. They also have to be able to withstand the crap they get from people who really are sick but had to wait hours and hours to be seen because they are not emergent. I am sure that toughness helps when a abused child or a raped teenager comes in for treatment. The ED nurses that I have met are awesome and they are able to withstand things I don't think I could. It is terrible what happened to this lady but I don't think we can just attribute it to the nurses. How about- we need a different system where urgent care is handled in sliding scale clinics so that our EDs are less clogged up with nonemergencies.

What I want to know is why, as a nation, do we give a darn who uses drugs? Make them legal, let the drug seekers get high and keep the criminals out of it, and when someone comes in and says they hurt help them.

We are such a bunch of judgmental Puritans. Goodness. Who cares if someone wants to be high? I certainly don't. Just stay away from the steering wheel.

I gotta jump in here. Yes, ER nurses can be judgemental, [b]but most of us still treat the pt.[B/] We are human just like everyone else, we have opinions and judgements, but what's at the core here is not how the triage nurse felt, but how she acted. Most of us would not have treated that woman the way she was treated. I resent the statements posted here that implies all of us would have done the same thing.

Not only that, but King Drew has a horrible history of pt mistreatment. Most facilities would not have tolerated this.

This is a "horrible act."