WAITING FOR EMERGENCY ROOMS AND ISSUES: Patients who check into a hospital's emergency room (ER) often

experience long wait times in an emergency room waiting area. These wait times are due to the triage process that is requisite to hospital admission, patient "boarding" (waiting for a bed), a shortage of on-call physicians and the pile-up of emergency patients due to local accidents and disasters. As ER wait times can lead to delayed treatment of patients who require immediate medical care, hospitals must focus efforts on reducing the amount of time patients must spend in the waiting area. Here are methods for how to reduce wait time in the emergency room.

Steps That can be taken to reduce Waiting Times: 1. Stop the practice of boarding patients. Instead of making patients sit in the ER waiting area until an emergency room bed opens up, place them in hospital beds in hospital rooms or department hallways. This helps ease overcrowding by dispersing the concentration of emergency patients throughout the hospital. 2. Register patients at their bedsides. This can reduce emergency wait time that is spent at the registration desk, or waiting for registration. 3. Redirect non-emergent patients to outside care providers. Studies show that a large percentage of emergency room patients arrive with a non-urgent care need. These patients may be triaged, and then educated on the proper use of the emergency room services and released to a non-emergency medical services provider. 4. Establish a system to fast-track patients with minor needs through the diagnosis and treatment process. Fast track systems involved ranking emergency room patients according to the urgency of their case, then using qualified nursing and mid-level provider staff to administer tests and oversee the care of non-critical patients.

5. Shorten specimen collection and laboratory processing times. To cut on costs, many hospital emergency departments downsize their phlebotomy staff and relegate sample collection to the on-staff doctors and nurses, in effect lengthening emergency room waiting. To shorten wait times related to sample collection, hire a staff of phlebotomists that are either on-call or dedicated to peak emergency department hours. 6. Use technologies that monitor and report on emergency room waiting times. Some hospitals are able to provide real-time information to potential patients regarding emergency waiting periods via the Internet or telephone text. That way, patients may view wait times before deciding to go to the emergency room, giving patients with non-immediate needs the opportunity to arrive for emergency room admission when the waiting room is less crowded. 7. Maximize emergency staff. Lengthy ER wait times can be greatly reduced by adding staff members to the emergency room intake department, as well as recruiting more on-call physicians and specialists.

NAME: AMBREEN MUGHAL ID: 6322 COARSE: MARKETING OF SERVICES ASSIGNMENT NO : 03 WAITING STRATEGIES