A New Kind of ER - with Elderly Health Care

A New Kind of ER - with Elderly Health Care Needs in Mind

Elderly people, for the most part, know how a visit to the emergency room at the hospital goes. They know that you arrive, and you wait. Depending on how urgent you need is, you can expect to wait just five minutes or you can expect to wait 12 hours. They just show up and resign themselves to waiting endlessly. It's just that emergency rooms have that clinical and harsh strip lighting, the floors are a stark white, the walls are bright, and it's very noisy. It's hardly the kind of place a disoriented elderly person with a medical condition should have to put up with. Thankfully, hospitals around the country are beginning to see as much too. An elderly person visiting emergency room at one of several hospitals today can expect a place built with elderly healthcare in mind.

They are called senior emergency rooms. The floors are made of nonslip material; there are handrails everywhere to hold onto; every bed has a special sensor that can alert the nurse if the patient gets up to wander. Everything is colored to be less bright, the lights included, and all writing is in larger lettering. And of course, there are reading glasses and hearing aids readily available. Patients who come into these new elderly healthcare centers with senior emergency rooms are just delighted by how their needs are finally being given priority.

Hospitals with these geriatric emergency departments have opened up everywhere - in Texas, New York, Kansas and elsewhere. How did the famously apathetic American healthcare system come to do such a nice thing with elderly healthcare needs in mind? To begin with, there is a growing realization all around the medical community that the average patient coming in from now on is going to be older and older each year. In about 20 years, 20% of America is going to be older than 65. Hospitals need to adapt to their biggest customer base if you want to put it that way. And then, there is the edge in the marketplace that such a move will gain a hospital. An elderly person thinking of which hospital to go to for a problem is sure to think, "I'm sure I want to go to the one with elderly health care needs in mind. Why should I go to the hospital that's noisy, apathetic, and that doesn't particularly care for me?".

The kind of care and attention you receive in a geriatric emergency room happens to be quite different too. Doctors and nurses are given special training courses in how to interact better with the elderly. And they are told to spend more time with each patient. It helps the hospital help elderly patients feel more comfortable of course. But it also helps them give their patients a better understanding of how to take their medicines and how to take care of themselves. The best test of a new idea of course is in the way it performs in the real world. Every senior ER in the country reports today on how doctors and nurses, now that they are given more time with each patient, diagnose diseases that they would have missed before.

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