ABSTRACT
Imagine you are a charge nurse in the emergency room (ER) trying to get a patient admitted to a bed in the hospital. You make multiple calls and find out that beds will be available “as soon as we can get the patient discharged.” Meanwhile, the ER waiting room is filling up with worried parents and sick children. All exam rooms in the ER are occupied by patients currently being cared for, waiting for test results, or waiting for admission to a hospital bed. For you, it’s “another day in the ER,” but you know that for the children and parents coming to you for help, the situation is at best stressful and at worst unsafe. So you keep making phone calls, hoping that your calls will “speed things up.”
