All is “Quiet” on the ER Front by Tim Erickson, M.D.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Tim Erickson, MDEver walk into a morning ER shift and note an atypically serene atmosphere with a couple of polite patients occupying only two of your 40 ED beds? You’re first reaction is to utter a conversational prediction- “Hey, looks like we’re going to have a quiet shift today” As soon as the dreaded “Q” word leaves your lips, every heads turns towards you in the department-- nurses, clerks, residents, consultants, housekeeping, phlebotomy, and radiology techs all glare at you as if you just completely jinxed the entire shift. For within minutes, half the population of the northern hemisphere is suddenly going to attack your ED like a critically ill swat team equipped with hot oil and battering rams.
Now you did it.
No matter what kind of ED I have worked in over my career, this has been a universal reaction- It seems to be similar to mentioning "no hitter" during a baseball game. I ask you, where is the science behind this paranoia? I find it hard to believe that the mere utterance from one’s tongue will change the spin of the globe and alter the path of all viral loads and bacterial plagues at that very moment. I just don’t have that much of a deity complex.
In response to this reaction, we are going to conduct the Q trial at our University Hospital- At 7am, on odd numbered days, every time we have less than 5 patients in our ED, our charge nurse will cry out “It looks like we’re going to have a quiet shift today”… For the next 8 hours we will monitor patient volume and acuity. On even days, under the same circumstances, no such phrase will be mentioned and we’ll compare statistics.
Is anyone aware of a similar study? Have any of you located in other parts of the country also encountered the “Quiet” reaction in your ED? Inquiring minds want to know...
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.” Robert Louis Stevenson
“If we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us than a golden slipper on a gouty foot.” John Bunyan
Crowding, Erickson, Humor in Miscellaneous
Reader Comments (2)
This is a pervasive one - the exact same thing happens across the world in Australia. It seems that superstition is still stronger than science in our community!
But this trial, admirable in its attempt to study a very important topic, will not be valid. This trial is an attempt to HELP the ER.....fickle Fate and the ER Gods will not be fooled. To say the "q" word in the emergency room violates all that many ER docs and nurses hold to be sacred. Must not taunt the ER gods.........in our ER, you could replace "all glare at you" with "immediately begin planning your death, in retribution for what you have surely just wrought."