When you are injured in New Mexico, you want the best care you can get. But when your injury is an emergency, you may not have time to pick and choose your health care providers. This post explores some of the measures that hospitals are encouraged to use to promote better patient outcomes.
According to the American College of Emergency Physicians, 90 percent of medical errors are due problems with health care delivery systems and procedures. While the shortcomings of the health care delivery system are often blamed on large-scale systemic problems like underfunded health care programs and medical staffing shortages, there are several low-cost steps that the ACEP recommends hospitals implement to ease emergency room congestion, lessen emergency physicians’ case loads and create an environment less conducive to medical mistakes.
If you are a patient in an emergency room that follows the ACEP recommendations, you may find yourself being transferred quickly from the emergency department to an inmpatient department. Moving patients into the main hospital once they have been stabilized creates empty beds in the emergency room, so doctors can treat incoming emergency patients more quickly. Under ACEP guidelines, when you are released from the hospital, you will be discharged before 12 p.m. An early discharge deadline that is uniform across the hospital will free up departmental beds so that other emergency patients can be moved into appropriate departments. If you require emergency surgery, an ACEP-guided hospital will have its elective surgery schedule spread out so that recovery rooms aren’t overloaded during the first part of the week when most elective surgeries are currently scheduled. The College recommendations are all designed to ease your flow in and out of the hospital, allowing doctors more time to thoroughly evaluate your immediate medical needs and begin your treatment faster.
This blog post is intended for informational purposes only and is not intended to be taken as legal advice.