East Valley AZ news on ED overcrowding
Posted by GruntDoc on 17th December 2006
In a very well written article from Arizona’s East Valley Tribune was this gem of a quip:
…
Down the hall, another woman is briefly handcuffed to her hospital bed. Mesa police arrested her for drunken driving and after finding a crack pipe in her car. A diabetic, she complained of lethargy and low blood sugar. Police brought her to the ER’s back door.
“We call it ‘arrest-o-genic shock,’ ” says Jane Rich, the night charge nurse who’s just taken over for Howard. “Sometimes I feel like we’re running a day care for naughty little children.”
It’s a very good article, and doesn’t try to whitewash the issue. Apparently everyone knows there’s a crisis in the ED’s, but nobody knows how to fix it. (And, as Symtym says, “Just go to the ER is not a national health policy”).
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