1

Who Should Transport?
Whitney Horne
Wheeling Jesuit University
NUR 450-80
Clinical Practicum
Maryanne Capp, RN, MSN
July 30th, 2014

2 Life in the Emergency Room is always fast-paced, chaotic, and if you are a nurse, you normally have a million things on your mind that you need to do for your patients. There are normally 2 or more ambulances sitting in the ER bay and over 10 patients waiting to be seen in the lobby. An ER nurse has a list of duties a mile long including primary care of 4-6 patients, giving multiple medications, taking care of trauma or critically ill patients, transporting patients to the floor with and without assistance from a transporter. However, after a few days of spending time in the Logan Regional Medical Center ER, I realized that RN’s transporting patients who were admitted to the facility was taking up over 30 minutes of their time, time they could have spent with critical patients or seeing a new patient. After much research, I have came up with a change project for Logan Regional ER that would definitely help cut down on waiting time for patients and take some of the workload off of the nursing staff. My change project consists of paid transporters, who are already staff in the ER for every shift and who have already had their CPR class, to transport non-critical patients to the floor without a nurse. These patients of course would be under the nurses care and it would be up to the nurse to make the decision whether they need the nurse to help transport or not. Transporters should be allowed to take telemetry patients and all patients who are not on critical drips, intubated, or a patient going to the ICU/CCU. After these patients are taken out of the room via stretcher by the transporter, old stretchers that have been recently repaired will be available to put in that room and the nurse will then be able to take on a new patient. This will take the patient wait time with each admission from over 30 minutes down to 5 minutes. Of course, the nurse that just admitted the patient will then need time to call the floor nurse and give report if this has not previously been done. 3 This change has needed done for staff satisfaction for a long time. Logan Regional Medical Center ER has been through the ringer trying to keep staffing, and I believe this could be part of the problem. Nurses arent just expected to do their job, but they are expected to transport as well, and most often it is with short-staffing so as soon as they return from the long haul up to the floor, they return with a new patient already sitting in their room. According to several research articles and different hospitals who have been using this method in their ER’s since 2005, telemetry monitors are basically over-rated and are only there in case something would happen to a patient during transport, but as research shows 310 out of 315 had a safe transport with no complications (Pines, J.M). The Logan Regional Medical Center ER nursing staff really liked the idea of the change and thought it was much needed. For this project, there will not be any special budget since transporters are already working every shift in the ER at this point. There is at least 1 transporter if not 2 for every 12 hour shift. There will need to be some help from the floor nurses to help get admitted patients to their new beds if they are unable to walk or assist the transporter. Floor nurses will also have to make themselves available to take report by phone since transporters are unable to do this. House administration will also have to be on board, in case of emergency during transport. Transporters should also carry their work cellphones and have them on at all times, so they are easy to access in case of emergency. My initial research came straight from the Logan Regional ER where I did clinicals for 3 straight days, 2 twelves hour shifts and 1 sixteen. Here I saw staff frustration with call-ins, and no-shows, with a full