Josyann Abisaab

The more prepared you are before you have to visit the hospital, the more smoothly the experience should go when you actually have an emergency.  If you are elderly and living alone, there are a number of precautions that you should take before an emergency room visit is necessary.

Make sure that you know which emergency room you’ll want to go to.  Plan out how you will get there and have the phone numbers for your friends, your taxi service or your other ideas easily accessible and by the phone.

Going to the hospital for a visit isn’t a bad idea, particularly if you’ve never been to this particular hospital.  Find out when you are there where you check in, where you wait and how the system works.  Obviously, if you are brought in by an ambulance, this information won’t be relevant.  But, it’s certainly possible that you will be coming on your own with a driver who has brought you.

In an interesting study in 2008, Dr. Manya Newton, an emergency room physician at the University of Michigan, and others, authored a paper explaining some of the reasons that emergency rooms are so overcrowded.  While many of us make the assumption that the uninsured are coming to the emergency room too frequently for non-essential visits, they found this to be a myth.  They found that, while 17% of the people in American were uninsured at the time, they only accounted for 10-15% of the visits to the ER.

One factor that they did find to explain the overcrowding is that the population at large is getting older and sicker.  More people are legitimately coming to the ER for real emergencies.  In addition, with fewer primary care doctors available, it’s harder to get an appointment.  If you call your doctor’s office and are put off, you might consider going to the ER instead.

These are a few of the interesting findings that these emergency room doctors reported.

When someone has been in the emergency room for care, they often don’t bother to follow through afterwards.  They might be happy to be feeling better the next day, or they are exhausted from their ordeal and don’t have the energy to follow through.  The follow through, however, is as important as is the emergency room care itself.  What does this mean?

Usually, when you are discharged from the emergency room you’ll be given follow-up instructions from the doctor.  You’ll often receive a written summary of how you should continue your care, when you should visit your primary care physician, what you should do if symptoms return, and more.  Before you leave the emergency room, make sure that you understand all instructions that the doctors and nurses give to you.  Don’t leave feeling that you still have questions that haven’t been answered!

Then, make sure to follow through.  Go and see your primary care physician the next day to give them the paperwork from the emergency room and to have them follow your care.  Get your prescriptions filled and take the medicine that the emergency room has recommended.  Pay attention for recurring symptoms, and more.  Just because you’ve left the emergency room, and the emergency doctor’s care, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t continue to be careful about your treatment and your follow-up care at home.