Seeing adults when "slow"?

[Pednurse3]

We have separate adult and ped ERs. We are now beginning to have fill-in adult doctors fill up our ped ER beds w adults. This creates 2 big problems for our nurses and patients: 1) our ped nurses are not familiar w adult ER protocols and care, 2) once our rooms are filled w adults the peds patients are forced to wait hours (invariably) for the adults to be discharged. I feel like our manager is trying to please the adult ER. I also feel that our mid levels and pediatricians are turning their heads to it to avoid confrontation. Any words of advice?

[anon456, BSN, RN]

They need to keep a few peds beds open all the time. What's the point of having a peds wing if the patients it's meant for are being displaced by adults?

[302queen]

where i work pt we have 3 er's adult physch and peds we never ever put adults in the peds er however we use adult er beds for non violent physch patients when we really need to and have on occasion used a spare physch er bed for a non acute er patient

[zmansc, ASN, RN]

Sounds like a misguided decisions to me, as you have obviously seen that it's not working well. Have these points been brought up? Has there been an explanation of the reasons/thinking on these issues? Hopefully, there is something we are not getting here that would explain the decision and will make it work better in the future, but that is highly doubtful.

Unfortunately, many misguided decisions are made and implemented. The front line workers often have to struggle with the attempts to implement those decisions and then later when the decisions is reversed, they get the "joy" of trying to undo the harm associated with the decision.

The best advice I can give, is to try to go with the flow, and collect whatever data is necessary to prove this decision is not beneficial to the patients or the bottom line. Armed with that, and a better plan, you and your colleagues might be able to reverse the decision at the right time.