JLARN77

first born daughter of alcoholic father

I have been working in our ED for one year, and understand exactly what you are saying. I felt the same way when I first started, trying to figure out what the other nurses were doing that I wasn't... and I found out that it just took me time to get more comfortable with the process and I am now able to do it just as quickly as anyone else. It is kind of like any new skill we learn the more we do it the better we become at it. Good luck and it will get easier and faster.

GORK God only really knows TMB too many birthdays That is all I can think of right now! Sorry if there are repeats, I didn't read the whole thread!!

In the ER I work in, we do follow up phone calls.... well as often as we can! We try to call the patients seen the previous day. Of course we exclude addmissions, transfers, and we have found our frequent fliers such as migraines and chronic painers that we see every other day, if we call them within in a couple hours they are back in our ER!! S.T.A.C.E.Y.'s list of questions is pretty close to what we use as a guideline to the phone calls. We do track our numbers and have a bulletin board that we acknowlege staff who have been mentioned by patients. We use Press-Ganey, and we tell our patients that they may receive a survey and to fill it out. Overall I think that the follow up phone calls are helpful, and patient's really appreciate someone calling them to check in, unfortunatley right now if someone manages to call a couple days out of the week it is the best we can do. Our phone calls are pretty informal, just a way to reach out to our patient again and let them know that we care. Good luck with your project!