Published
I know it very's from hospital to hospital, but what's your general policy regarding patients going AMA who still have their IV in place?
The LEO's we work with will bring the patient back only if they have physicians orders saying the person for x reason can not leave the hospital ie if they're being petitioned and bolt during the process. If the orders do exist then they want a faxed copy before they will do anything with the person. For the IV in place on the eloped patient they simply do a welfare check to inform the person they can go back to the hospital to have the IV removed. Then the officer will make contact with us and let us know if they were able to get a hold of the person. My dept works with them so much that we have a list of their policies that we deal with on a regular basis.
We had a guy leave after being discharged but before the paperwork was complete and his IV had been removed. Why? He was mad at the docs for not giving him the prescriptions he wanted. We tried to make contact, called security, called admissions, paged overhead, etc. Pt knew he was supposed to stay but didn't. We waited 4 hours and he didn't come back. Charted it, etc. What's the story on that? He didn't leave AMA - he was discharged, he just left w/o paperwork/scripts. Didn't respond to calls, etc. So what then?
northshore08
257 Posts
If they realized it, I guess it could usher in a whole new era of ED frequent flyers...sign in, get your iv, leave, etc...
We could stop the clean needle programs all over the country and divert all that taxpayer money to the local community ED!!!
Might even lower the rates of HIV and hepatitis....
Sorry, it got away from me