M/S Nurse to pick up ED patients

[Vicki_RN]

Hi, my med/surg colleagues would like to know if any nurses go to the ED to pick up their patients to decrease transfer times to the door? Thank you!

[dennis8, ADN, BSN, CNA, RN]

I think it will depend on the hospital. At mine, the ED will bring the patient to the floor and place telemetry monitors on them if needed.

[brownbook]

I can't imagine a med/surg nurse with 5, 6, 8 patients being able to leave her unit to go to ER and bring the patient up.

But I believe in team work. IF the med/surg nurse has the time and someone can watch her patients there is no reason she can't.

Assuming the ER is really busy with critical patients.

There are a lot of assumptions in my reply!

[Cowboyardee]

I've been in hospitals that do this occasionally. It can work as a rare solution to a crisis in the ED where the staff are stretched too thin to move patients along effectively. However, I would hazard to guess that if a hospital decided to have med-surg nurses routinely pick up their own patients from the ED, it would slow down the process of getting patients out of the ED rather than speed it up.

[Wuzzie]

On 3/5/2019 at 6:54 PM, brownbook said:

I can't imagine a med/surg nurse with 5, 6, 8 patients being able to leave her unit to go to ER and bring the patient up.

But I believe in team work. IF the med/surg nurse has the time and someone can watch her patients there is no reason she can't.

Assuming the ER is really busy with critical patients.

There are a lot of assumptions in my reply!

Not being snarky, truly I'm, not but why would it be any different than the ED nurse leaving hers?

[brownbook]

48 minutes ago, Wuzzie said:

Not being snarky, truly I'm, not but why would it be any different than the ED nurse leaving hers?

I agree, there would have to be some damn good reason the ER nurses couldn't leave???? Code Triage...multiple traumas...critically ill child?????

[Wuzzie]

10 minutes ago, brownbook said:

I agree, there would have to be some damn good reason the ER nurses couldn't leave???? Code Triage...multiple traumas...critically ill child?????

How busy are you when you get an admission? Being an ED nurse is like having 5-6 new admits at all times in constant turnover. It doesn't make any more sense to expect them to leave the unit then it does a floor nurse. I like the idea of a floating admit nurse who comes down to the ED and gets things rolling.

[brownbook]

I like the idea of a transport team, of CNA's, or PCT's. Both scenarios, the med/surg nurse leaving her unit, and the ER nurse leaving the ER, are not ideal. I think it's stupid for an average stable patient going to the floor to require a RN to transport them.

[Wuzzie]

Fortunately in ours they didn't and monitored patients could go up with a medic. We only had to transport ICU patients, newly started transfusions and any patient with a drip titrated or untitrated. Before I left they had started having the ICU nurse come down for report and we both transported the patient. Everyone was happy with that.