April 13, 2012 - At our PAC Members’ Meeting this week we tried a new exercise to gather peoples’ thoughts about health care services. We wanted to learn about the patient experience of emergency rooms. We collected short descriptions about the current state of emergency rooms, and then we asked participants to write descriptors of an ideal emergency room (heaven) setting and a worst-case (hell) emergency room setting. We also asked what events or actions might lead to each scenario. The discussion was lively and everyone had brilliant ideas about what might constitute the emergency room in heaven. Not surprisingly, some said that the emergency room now is the ER room from hell.
Waiting time was not the only issue. Parking costs loomed high in some of the discussions - a $30 charge for parking can pose a serious barrier. Some forward-thinking participants pointed out that in heaven there would be no emergency room at all - if you needed hospitalization you would go straight in, and if you did not, you would be cared for by a community agency.
It seemed there were not too many ideas about how to get to heaven. Most said that the journey to hell would be pretty short - limited resources in the community combined with a continued poor economy over a period of time would put unbearable pressure on emergency rooms making them go from difficult to impossible.
Yesterday we repeated the exercise at a general session of the Central West LHIN and gained similar responses.
Now we must collect all of these ideas for analysis. If you would be interested in helping us input data for a half-day over around late April, please email christina.spencer@patientsassociation.ca.
We are looking forward to gaining clearer insight to the patient perspective on emergency rooms!