whose fault is it?
why are patients being held up in the ER?

patients who crowd the ER for real concerns of unknown or scary but non emergent cases. can you blame them?

diagnostic tests techs who are squeezing in non emergent cases while waiting for emergent ones and are in the middle of something when the emergency test is being ordered. is it their fault if some of the machines either play up or just all of a sudden stopped working? can you blame them?

housekeepers who have been paged to clean three isolation rooms before they get the call to clean a room stat, for an admit, and can’t make it because they are in the middle of their 30 minute lunch break which was supposed to be hours ago, but they never had the chance to take? can you blame them?

patients who are supposed to go home, their family on the freeway, but there was an accident so they were late in picking up. can you blame them?

doctors who are forced to deal with a number of patients more than humanly possible to handle. those who get weary and forget to write or ask a few things and end up eating more of the very small time the ER nurses have. can you blame them?

floor nurses who are sitting on their chairs, doing nothing, who have no idea they’re supposed to go up the ladder and take off the old curtains so the isolation room can be ready ASAP. those who, after four straight hours of assessment, cleaning, repositioning, suctioning, changing linens, changing dressings, calling docotrs, following up lab draws, giving meds, changing diapers, following up with pharmacy, feeding, reassuring families, have the audacity to sit down and catch their breath just because. can you blame us?

well, maybe you can blame some of us. but you can’t blame ALL of us.

there maybe patients, techs, doctors, or nurses who delight in nothing but delay. they find it very amusing that ER nurses are up to their necks with things to do, and a place so chaotic, they end up very edgy. some people probably wake up each day, thinking of things they can do to create a sense of imbalance in ER, and to annoy the ER nurses.

there is a possiblity that some people are like that…but not ALL people are like that.

when i receive a patient from ER whose bottoms are covered with hardened stool, (the kind of stool that even a ten year old will know have been in there since who knows when) i gather the things i need, and clean the patient. i won’t lie and say i was happy i get to clean the patient when he should have been cleaned a decade ago, but i don’t go around telling everyone that ALL ER nurses don’t have the heart to care enough to clean a patient.  i reason out that there must have been some emergency trauma cases that poured in one after the other, and seriously, nobody really died from an unclean ass. saving lives is more important than cleaning poop. i get that.

when i see ER nurses sitting, doing nothing, then i get an admit from the ER,whose urine leaked under the sheets and was soaking wet, it is NOT automatic for me to think that “ER nurses are lazy and superior, they don’t think keeping a patient clean matters”.

is it then too much to ask, that ER nurses NOT automatically think that floor nurses who are sitting, doing nothing are lazy asses causing the delay in patient admission?

some things are just unavoidable. it is not a sin to see a messed up system and believe no one is to blame. sometimes, it is just a series of unforeseen, unfixable events. sometimes, despite heroic efforts to make things move faster, there are still instances when delays happen. sometimes, there is absolutely no one to blame, and it is absolutely no one’s fault, and things can still be okay.

at the end of the day, blaming anyone doesn’t REALLY help the patient. we are all in this together, and we are better off as a team rather than competitors.

sorry for the rant. i just chimed in because geena asked. not just me specifically, but i’m one of the med-surg nurses.