Emergency Room- What happens behind the scenes?

 

What is it really like to work in the emergency room? For medical students, this may seem like an unanswerable question. You may have seen ER on TV and think that doctors just go in, deal with one patient at a time, then do it all over again. But there’s so much more than what you see on TV! And we’re here to give you an inside look into what goes on behind the scenes of your favorite show.

In the United States, almost a third of people wait less than fifteen minutes to be treated by emergency room staff. This is because some hospitals advertise that they have shorter or decreased waiting times for their ER patients since it’s popularly believed that if you aren’t gravely injured then you might end up waiting hours before being seen by anyone. Additionally only 11.9% of visit results in patient admission into hospital as well.

While the emergency room is usually crowded with patients who come for non-urgent medical issues, many people seem to treat it like an after hours doctor’s office.

 

Why Do People Go to the Emergency Room?

 

New research suggests that headaches and migraines are the main reasons why people end up at an emergency room.

 

While most of us would never go to a hospital for something as simple as having a headache, new research shows that they’re actually more common than you think! For many patients who seek medical treatment from hospitals’ Emergency Rooms (ERs), this type of pain is usually what brings them there in the first place. What’s surprising about all these head aches isn’t so much how frequent they happen but rather their cause: not just bad tension or stress like we might assume, but also migraine symptoms and even exposure to bright lights!

 

The other reasons that compete for the top ten reasons to visit an emergency room are back pain or spine issues; sprains and fractures; upper respiratory infections / constricted breathing, asthma & toothaches.

 

Watch any television show that is set in a hospital, and it’s most likely focused on the emergency room. After all, that’s where all action happens! But tv portrayal of ER doesn’t always capture full picture- people who make ER run efficiently are not shown.

 

A triage nurse is the first medical professional that a patient sees when they visit an emergency room. The triage nurse determines which cases are most urgent and then assigns those patients to nurses with specialties in their areas of need such as administering intravenous fluids, cleaning burns or wounds, etc.

Patients’ concerns will be addressed by attending physicians who manage the ER and oversee some of its procedures.



Who You Might See?

 

There are plenty of other professionals in the emergency room who have very different and specific tasks. An EMT may be responsible for getting a patient to the hospital from their home or an accident scene. They can record heart activity with an electrocardiogram (EKG) if someone is experiencing chest pains. A phlebotomist is trained to take blood and an x-ray technician takes and delivers x-rays to doctors in the ER. A patient who’s having trouble breathing might be treated by a respiratory therapist, or someone experiencing intense anxiety may receive treatment from a mental health provider.

 

Healthcare professionals working in hospital emergency rooms are trained to prioritize the severity of patients’ medical problems.

 

The goal for healthcare professionals is to treat both patients who are suffering from serious physical distress and those whose issues aren’t as urgent, but they’re still important enough that should be addressed immediately.

If working in an emergency room and having your adrenaline flow gets you excited, consider a career as a medical assistant. Just think: showing up to the hospital is much better than being rescued by ambulance!



Working in the emergency room is not as simple as it looks on TV. It’s an intense and fast paced environment, where you need to be able to handle everything from a car accident victim with broken bones to a pregnant mom who needs her blood pressure taken! If this sounds like something that would interest you, we’re here for you every step of the way – visit our site today and see if one of BBMI’s many programs can help get your medical career started off right!