Out of all the patients in an emergency waiting room only twenty-nine percent of them are actually emergency cases (Erni, B, 2013). People today are using the emergency department as their primary care provider. Although this brings a lot of business to the hospital, the new trending topic is whether or not the emergency department should only be treating emergency cases. Patients with life threatening conditions are possibly being overlooked due to the emergency room staff attending to non-emergency patients. Some hospitals are realizing that it is their right to prioritize emergency cases over non-emergency cases. However, other hospitals have not yet taken this approach in which case a patient's life threatening condition can worsen while waiting for care. .
The major problem is that people feel as if they have no other place to go to be treated. A reason for this could be because there is a lack of primary care physicians. This makes people become regulars to the hospital's emergency department. The number of these type of people not only overwhelms the hospital, but also becomes an issue with leaving behind patients with true emergency cases in the waiting room while someone with a common cold is being treated. Hospitals across the country have been trying to eliminate this problem by having patients that come in be checked immediately and undergo a Medical Screening Exam, which decides if their issue is an immediate emergency or just something simple. The patients with the emergency cases go back to the actual emergency rooms, while the others get triaged to another area (Doyle, D. 2013). "All of this expedites patient care, decreasing wait times as much as sixty-four percent" (Doyle, D. 2013, para. 12). Using the medical screening exams helps free up beds more quickly in the emergency department and allows the patients to receive the care they need in a more timely matter.