Health Care

Identify a barrier or issue in health care that you want to address through your capstone project paper. Perform a literature review on the barrier or issue using the GCU Library. Present 8-10 peer-reviewed primary research articles. These articles should be either qualitative or quantitative.

You may use either health care or nursing peer-reviewed journals; however, at least half of the primary articles must come from peer-reviewed nursing journals. The peer-reviewed articles must consist of research published within the last 5 years.

Use the “HLT-494 – Literature Evaluation Table” template to document your detailed assessment of each primary study. This document helps break down the components of each article to ensure the article meets the requirements for a professional nursing paper. Ensure that each of your articles provides information that meets each criterion listed. Assess the research and provide a detailed and clear explanation how each article supports your capstone project and evidence-based practice (between five and six sentences).

This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.

While APA style is not required for the body of this assignment, solid academic writing is expected, and in-text citations and references should be presented using APA documentation guidelines, which can be found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.

The health care issue is ” How to decrease long wait times in the emergency rooms”.

ANSWER

Decreasing Long Wait Time in Emergency Rooms

Long wait time in emergency rooms is a major issue experienced in most if not all the hospitals worldwide (Godley & Jenkins., 2019). Emergency rooms are the most important of all rooms in a hospital setting. This is attributed to the fact that delicate cases are handled there. Cases where human lives hang on a thread of hope. This paper takes a deep look at how to decrease the long wait time experienced in emergency rooms in hospitals.

Most hospitals experience the issue of long queues in hospital emergency rooms because of analog and outdated systems of record-keeping (Aburayya., 2020). These hospitals have to go through the hustle of unpacking a ton of files containing the data that they need checking. Also, recording this data takes a long time since it is done by the human effort which is bound to depletion. The record keepers get tired of writing down every tiny detail which some of them are not even needed. The hospitals should come up with a digital system where they can be able to use computers for the same tasks. Computers are fast and do not forget since they do not rely on human memory (Aburayya., 2020). They are fast and need less time when keying in data. They also have additional benefits like backup where data can be backed up in servers hence easily retraceable.

Payment systems in these hospitals are very poor and strict. Most hospitals have the rule that for an emergency patient to be attended to, they must clear at least half of the bill if not all of it. These harsh rules make the patients who cannot meet the end part of the deal sit in the hospital’s verandas begging the doctors to allow them to be treated then pay later. If one goes in the emergency room, the long line of the patients is horrendous since some of them are critically wounded and lying on the floors if not in hospital beds outside the hospital waiting to be attended to. The hospitals should have policies that favor the ones who cannot pay like loans within the hospitals granted to the patients who then upon recovering can repay before leaving the hospital. The hospitals should also accept other payment methods like insurance covers since some of them do not which disadvantage the patients.

In conclusion, the problems experienced in the emergency rooms are internal and can be addressed within the hospital’s management to find better solutions and methods to decrease them.

References

Aburayya, A., Alshurideh, M., Albqaeen, A., Alawadhi, D., & Ayadeh, I. (2020). An investigation of factors affecting patients waiting time in primary health care centers: An assessment study in Dubai. Management Science Letters, 10(6), 1265-1276.

Dishman, E. (2021). 8. Technology Solutions. In Independent for Life (pp. 99-112). University of Texas Press.

Godley, M., & Jenkins, J. B. (2019). Decreasing wait times and increasing patient satisfaction: a lean six sigma approach. Journal of nursing care quality, 34(1), 61-65.

Itegboje, A. O., & Asafe, Y. N. (2019). A Systematic Review of Queue Management System: A Case of Prolonged Wait Times in Hospital Emergency Rooms.

Kaushik, N., Khangulov, V. S., O’Hara, M., & Arnaout, R. (2018). Reduction in laboratory turnaround time decreases emergency room length of stay. Open access emergency medicine: OAEM, 10, 37.

Lindner, G., & Woitok, B. K. (2021). Emergency department overcrowding. Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift, 133(5), 229-233.

Parker, C. A., Liu, N., Wu, S. X., Shen, Y., Lam, S. S. W., & Ong, M. E. H. (2019). Predicting hospital admission at the emergency department triage: a novel prediction model. The American journal of emergency medicine, 37(8), 1498-1504.

Salehi, L., Phalpher, P., Valani, R., Meaney, C., Amin, Q., Ferrari, K., & Mercuri, M. (2018). Emergency department boarding: a descriptive analysis and measurement of impact on outcomes. Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine, 20(6), 929-937.