Emergency Department

The Emergency Department is considered one of the most important departments in hospitals. It is the only department that opens its doors to the community and does not close them during the day and throughout the night or go to the patient at any time. Therefore, Dar Al Shifa Hospital devotes all its human and material energy to improve the service in the emergency departments.

The Dar Al Shifa Hospital administration makes continuous and intensive efforts to provide the health care that visitors expect. The waiting period is the biggest challenge for emergency departments in general. At Dar Al Shifa Hospital, the staff does its utmost to maintain the average waiting period to be two hours at most, which is considered a time similar to the average waiting period in international hospitals.

The procedures for following up on the patient and providing first aid in the emergency departments go through well-studied stages and followed policies that are implemented with extreme precision and high professionalism. They begin with the patient entering the department, where a highly experienced nurse called the “triage nurse” classifies the case according to its severity and speed of dealing with it. For example, cases of a cold are expected to wait two hours to receive the necessary medical care, while cases of chest pain receive health care within minutes.

On the other hand, the Emergency Department at Dar Al Shifa Hospital has a special policy for reporting delays, where the General Manager of the hospital is notified directly of any delay exceeding six hours, and the Head of the Emergency Department is also notified of any case that exceeds four hours. Despite the varying waiting periods, it must be noted here that this waiting should not negatively affect the patient’s health under any circumstances. This is a basic and top priority that should not be taken lightly. The waiting period, which may reach an average of two hours and sometimes exceed four hours, may seem long to many people and even to many doctors. But this feeling will soon disappear if the attending physician informs the patient that the time required to analyze a blood sample to check kidney and liver functions takes an hour and a half, in addition to the time required to examine the patient and examine him by the physician, and the process of withdrawing and transferring blood, not to mention the time required to perform X-rays, CT scans and MRI if the patient’s condition requires it. In the United States of America, a special study was conducted to examine the effectiveness and speed of emergency departments in the United States of America. The average time required to admit a patient was 6 hours. This study was published under the title “Emergency Department Performance in the United States in Terms of Waiting Time and Visit Duration” The emergency department in any hospital is a department concerned with treating emergency cases. The definition of an emergency case is an acute medical condition that, if not treated quickly, there is a high probability that it will pose a threat to the patient’s life. The ease of access to the emergency department and the lack of community awareness of the concept of an emergency case make the department a destination for everyone looking for medical care, whether it is an emergency or not, which unfortunately leads to the emergency department turning into a pharmacy to dispense medicine, or a quick clinic to treat cases. Chronic, or a way to get a close medical appointment, or a place to change wounds, or a destination for malingering patients who want to get undeserved leave, this unjustified pressure on emergency departments makes these departments less effective and doubles the work of the medical, nursing and technical staff and increases the waiting period for the patient with an actual emergency condition who needs priority direct and rapid care.

The lack of community awareness of the nature of the work of the emergency department and the patients’ lack of knowledge of their duties and rights exacerbates the problem and makes the emergency department a place for many quarrels and disputes, which often end with undesirable consequences. The nature of the work of emergency departments is a difficult task due to its privacy and danger, given the direct contact of the working staff with patients and their families in the most difficult stages of their lives, which is the stage of suffering from pain, where you find the reviewers agitated and tense due to their ignorance of the nature and mechanism of the work of the emergency department, which sometimes reaches verbal or physical violence against the staff. The situation is made worse by the difficulty of controlling the number of companions for a single patient, which may reach dozens in many cases, which confuses the work and creates a state of tension among the medical staff and the patients themselves.

Finally, spreading community awareness and informing people about the mechanism of the emergency department and their rights and duties is necessary for the work of the emergency department, saves effort and time, and provides the opportunity for the medical and technical staff to work with high efficiency, which is positively reflected in serving the patient.