The Importance Of Boarding In The Emergency Room

A nursing problem that is concerning to this author is that psychiatric patients that are boarding in the emergency room do not have a therapeutic environment to starting the healing and recovery process. This phenomenon of concern is important to the writer because the writer works in an emergency room and sees this every day. Most nurses went into nursing to help people this writer does not feel like she is helping these psychiatric patients when they are boarding in the emergency room. Boarding is considered, “the holding of a patient in an ED bed while awaiting an inpatient mental health bed” (Nicks & Manthey, 2012, p. 1). This write believes that the environment that the patients is in needs to be changed if these patients are going to …show more content…
A non-therapeutic environment would be an environment that is loud and noisy and does not allow the patient to cope with his or her symptoms (Appelbaum, 2015, p. 669). Inpatient mental health beds have decreased from “3.7 beds per 1000 persons in 1990 to 2.6 beds in 2000” (Nolan, Fee, Cooper, Rankin, & Blegen, 2015, p. 57). With the decrease of inpatient beds, there has been an increase in psychiatric patient boarding in the emergency room, and this is where the environment that the patient is boarding in becomes so …show more content…
According to an evidence-based research by IAHSS, the goal is to create an area that “provides[s] a safe, calm and therapeutic environment for the patients” (IAHSS, 2015, p. 9). This allows the provider and staff members to “assess, manage and deliver treatment” to these patients (IAHSS, 2015, p. 9). By having a therapeutic environment for the psychiatric patients that are boarding in the emergency room the staff members of the emergency room are able to give the patient the quality care that he or she