Overcrowding in hospital emergency departments generates headlines and a perception that there is a “crisis” in services. It has a negative impact on staff and patients in the immediate environment and risks compromising the safety of care. There are also knock-on effects such as the widespread cancellation of elective (planned) surgery and has even led to calls for medical students to volunteer their services to their local emergency department.
A new paper published in the Royal Society Journal of Medicine entitled How can operational research and ethnography help to fix your emergency department? takes a considered view of the problem and what providers can do about it. Using insights gained from work in operational research and ethnography, and direct experience of being “embedded” in hospital care settings, CLAHRC researcher Sonya Crowe and colleagues provide a considered view of the issue and propose some actions hospitals can take to tackle the problem.
Read the paper below
Crowe, S., Grieco, L., Vindrola-Padros, C., Elkhodair, S., Walton, H., Fulop, N. J., & Utley, M. (2019). How can operational research and ethnography help to fix your emergency department? Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141076819856879
