Atrium Medical Center

Well, well, well- just used the new Atrium Hospital last night. The wife had some chest pains so we made a trip to the Emergency Room for the first time since the hospital opened. We arrived around 10:30PM and signed in. We told the desk person that she has had two heart attacks, four bypasses, stents in the heart and , in-general, was a candidate at any time for heart issues. We had a seat and around midnight or so, they called her in to to have her vitals taken (temp-blood pressure) and told us to take a seat again. Around 1AM, with the chest pains subsiding, we decided that life was too short (and I had to get up at 5AM to go to work) and told the desk personnel that we were leaving. The response was overwhelming!!!! She just said "ok" and off we went. She will call her doctor today for a follow-up to this event. Now- I don't know what kind of experiences you've all had at Atrium, but at this point, we're not experiencing a warm fuzzy feeling as we are not off to a good start with the new hospital. Hopefully, the next event will be more pleasant. Either they have incompetent people working in that area, the staff is overwhelmed with the patient influx or they just don't care how they do their job- don't know at this point but Douggie McNeil has a problem and may not know it.(or care)

Next time I would dial 911, especially with chest pains and your wifes history and take the ambulance to the ER and avoid the ER front desk altogether.  

I would be very interested in your doctors response to this unacceptable response from the emergency room.

Please share this info here and tell your wife we are all praying for her health to improve.

Holy cow, Vet!!

I want to be treated at this Nurses Hospital.  Having had a Heart Attack myself this concerns me about Atrium.  In talking with Atrium Personnel I was told that their goal is to treat Heart Attack Patients within 10 minutes of arriving at the ER, and I thought that 10 minutes was an excessive amount of wait time for someone having a Heart Attack.

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Posted on Sunday, September 17, 2006 12:25:30 AM by 60Gunner

Being an ER nurse, I tend to fasten my attention onto cases such as this one.

According the the AP story, a 49-year-old woman came into the ER complaining of chest pain, nausea, and shortness of breath. (Okay, all you nurses out there: pipe down and let the laypersons catch up.) She is triaged, classified "semi-emergent," and instructed to wait for her name to be called. Two hours later, when the woman's turn to be seen had arrived and her name was called by the triage nurse, the woman did not respond, The nurse approached the woman and found her unresponsive and pulseless. (That's medical-ese for "dead.")

The ensuing coroner's inquest ruled the woman's death a homicide. No details are available at this time regarding exactly who is to be charged with this woman's death.

Here is my view of the matter.

At the emergency department in which I am employed, there is a simple standard of practice that governs the treatment of any person who complains of chest pain, shortness of breath, and nausea, whether the person is 18 or 90 years old, and it is as follows: Treat it as a heart attack. That means get them into a treatment room, Give them oxygen, stick a large-bore (20 gauge or larger) IV needle into them (two would be better), draw labs including troponin I (a marker for cardiac injury), slap cardiac monitor leads onto them and perform a 12-lead electrocardiogram. If their blood pressure is stable, we may also give a spray of sublingual nitroglycerine and four baby aspirin.

(One may say that 18 years old is a bit young to be having a heart attack, and it is. But it happens; not very often, mind you, but just often enough to cause us to keep our guard up. So we don't take any chances.)

The rationale for all of these drastic measures (all of which occur within minutes of admission) is that if we act on the assumption of the worst-case, we will already be ahead of the curve. We can always back off on treatment strategies if it turns out to be something other than cardiac-related. But if it turns out to be a heart attack, then time is of the essence. And if the ER staff was caught flatfooted, the patient can die and the staff can be in a lot of trouble, as is the case with this Illinois ER.

Now, I was obviously not there to see all that went on in this woman's case, and therefore I will not point fingers. But I suspect that the error occurred because of an inexperienced triage nurse. On the other hand, triage nurses as a rule have to be experienced nurses before given that duty, in order to avoid this kind of tragedy. I think that in such a case, the only thing that could throw off the triage nurse's assessment would be whether or not the patient drove herself (or was driven by a friend or loved one) versus calling 911 and being transported by ambulance. Even then, given the victim's symptomology and the fact that she showed up in an ER, I am having a very hard time giving this staff the benefit of the doubt.

The moral of this story for the nurses who read this is: chest pain + shortness of breath + nausea = heart attack until proven otherwise.

And the moral of the story for my non-nursing readers out there is: chest pain + shortness of breath + nausea = heart attack until proven otherwise. So if you have these symptoms, don't be stupid. Do not drive yourself to the hospital or even ask a friend or loved one to do it. Call 911 and sit tight. You will get there faster, and you'll be taken a lot more seriously than if you were to walk in under your own power like so many frequent flyers with anxiety attacks do. We are skilled and trained, but you have to help us out here.

Somebody in that Illinois ER is going to pay with his/her license and maybe even some jail time before this is over. The hospital will likely be out millions of dollars. I can't really defend that, and I won't even try. In my heart of hearts, I know that there is no excuse for allowing a patient who may be having a heart attack to sit for two hours when an EKG and labs can be done on a stretcher in the ER hallway in five minutes and the patient can at least be monitored.