RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 The ‘who are all these people?’ study
JF Emergency Medicine Journal
JO Emerg Med J
FD BMJ Publishing Group Ltd and the British Association for Accident & Emergency Medicine
SP 109
OP 111
DO 10.1136/emermed-2013-202478
VO 32
IS 2
A1 Peadar Gilligan
A1 Danny Joseph
A1 Matthew Bartlett
A1 Aoife Morris
A1 Ajay Mahajan
A1 Karen McHugh
A1 Fiona Hillary
A1 Patrick O'Kelly
YR 2015
UL http://emj.bmj.com/content/32/2/109.abstract
AB Background Overcrowding of emergency departments (EDs) adversely affects the delivery of emergency care and results in increased patient mortality. Objective and methods To examine what contributes to the ED crowd and to specifically examine the patient associated population. The ED in which the research was performed is consistently one of the most overcrowded in Ireland. Results On average 66.7% of the patients in the ED during the study period were boarded awaiting a hospital bed following full processing by the ED staff and agreement by the on-call team that admission was required. The most overcrowded part of the department was the majors area. In this area 55.5% of those present were patients, visitors accounted for 16.6% of occupants, nursing staff 11%, on-call teams 7% and the ED doctors 6.3%. Conclusions Knowing who the people in the crowd are helps to guide management decisions about how the crowd might be reduced. Our department now has a strict accompanying person/visitor policy that limits the number of visitors to patients and limits visiting times for those relatives with a patient who is experiencing a prolonged stay in the ED.