Dr. Beel is also on the faculty of St. Joseph Mercy Hospital and the University of Michigan Emergency Medicine Residency in Ann Arbor. Patient satisfaction isn't the only thing that suffers when there are long waits in the emergency department. When a patient calls a doctor on staff and the doctor tells them to go to the ED, that's a referral. And if we don't handle that referral well, if the patient perceives that he or she had to wait too long, it's going to impact the referring physician's practice in a negative way. It's so much nicer working in a department that's caught up.
Patients are happy.
Things are flowing. The staff is happy. Emergency physicians who tend to be more efficient, tend to enjoy their work a lot more. And they also tend to be able to leave work at a reasonable time. But there are many strategies for doing things faster that can be practiced by physicians at all levels of experience.