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To: Hospital
Registration is not Clinical!
Registration staff is not trained to be able to responsibly determine patient severity working at the ED check in window. We have heard multiple times that the nursing staff will be our support, but often we are left here alone and need to make a choice on calling an emergency code or leaving somebody sit to wait for the nurses to assign a bed.
The emergency department would benefit by having medical personnel doing the job that registration has been doing for the past few years.
We also would be able to do our registration duties more efficiently, as we would have more coverage on the ER floor. This is especially important when there are only one or two employees on the clock in the later hours...and one of them is checking everybody in, unable to leave their position to help.
Why is this important?
Patient safety is a major concern. Registration is not medical staff, thus we are unable to perform basic first aid duties or CPR if need be. If we are unsure about a situation, the only option is to call a code medical response, which can take up time and resources for other patients who need critical care.
We did not take this job on to do the duties of a nurse, nurses aid, or the like. We took on this job to provide accurate insurance information for billing and to confirm patient demographics. This is unable to be done efficiently when three shifts a day are doing a job that we are not meant to be doing, especially without clinical support.
When patients come in and they need help and nurses are unavailable, we aren't able to help them. We can't do anything except sit and watch them in pain, bleeding, or vomiting. This looks bad on the emergency department and on the hospital as a whole.
