Stereotypes In The Emergency Room

Chances are that at some point in everyone’s lives, people will have experiences in the ER, whether they are being admitted, having tests done, or just visiting a loved one. Many people who visit emergency rooms think they are very strict and high-stress environment; nurses are speaking to each other by using jargon that few people understand. What patients do not see is the hospital from the perspective of a staff member; it is completely different from a nurse’s point of view. I chose to observe an emergency room to reveal how the nursing staff functions, as well as confirming or busting the stereotype of how hospitals run based on television shows such as Grey’s Anatomy. I contacted my aunt, Emily Clarkin, who doubled as my informant. She …show more content…
There are four floors in the hospital. The basement is for storage and conference rooms with a wound clinic. The first floor is the emergency room, cardiac rehab, radiology, and operation rooms. The second floor has telemetry on one side and the intensive care unit on the other; there is also a geriatric mental health unit. The third floor has orthopedics and neonatal intensive care. All of the time I spent at the hospital was on the first floor. The emergency area has eight rooms total, with the nurses’ station centered in the middle of the …show more content…
Big bags of gas station-brand candy filled the desk space. The nurses were often sitting around until a new patient appeared on the computers; it was now a race to see who could click on the patient’s name and assign them a room the fastest. The flu was a common sickness that patients were coming in with; almost every patient that came through was tested for influenza. The calmness was interrupted when a nurse got a call from an EMT that an extremely drunk man had fallen and hit his head, he would be arriving in an ambulance in just under ten minutes. While anxiously waiting for the man to arrive, a nineteen year old boy was being brought in for psychological reasons. He was extremely stoned and was threatening his friends, so his mom called 911. When he arrived, the nurses removed everything he was wearing and took everything out of his pockets. From there his belongings were stuffed into a storage box, the kind that you would normally find under your bed. The box was placed behind the nurse's’ office space and forgotten about until later. The other remaining nurses then set up a screen to monitor the kid; it would be displayed in the office. The screen flickered on, and it looked an awful lot like the night vision cameras that they use on