The “no-wait ER” program launched in April after leadership figured out that structural processes were the cause of long wait times for patients, hospital CEO Joseph Webb, MD, told wkrn.com. They sought to reshape the process. Traditionally, patients would check in and be asked to wait until a triage nurse could assess them. The hospital eliminated this step by having patients immediately greeted and assessed by a triage team.
“When you decide as a patient that you’re sick enough or in enough pain that you need to go to the emergency department, you want the staff to take care of you and treat you with urgency,” Clinical Director of Emergency Services Ashley Midkiff, RN, told the news outlet. “You want to feel like a priority, and just [by] changing our workflow, that’s what we did.”
The average wait time for emergency room visits is two hours and 25 minutes, but at Nashville General Hospital, the wait time for door-to-bed time was 25 minutes and door-to-doctor was 34 minutes. After the program launched, the wait times were four and five minutes, respectively.
The “no-wait ER” has also reduced the length of stay for low-acuity patients by 36% — a change from a high of 140 minutes to less than 90 minutes on average.
The program has a three tier system, according to the hospital website. Patients arrive at the hospital and are immediately assessed by the triage team. Using advanced diagnostic tools, the team identifies the nature of the emergency and then immediate and appropriate treatment begins. A separate entrance is used for ambulance patients who are treated according to their level of severity.
The hospital handles more than 30,000 emergency room visits each year.
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