Emergent Care



Emergent Care

Overview of the topic

The emergency room encounter is for most, a moment that is both terrifying and compelling. The very nature of a health emergency is that it is an unplanned event, with potentially profound life altering consequences. The emergency room (ER) epitomizes the very best life saving treatment that science and medicine have to offer. It is a place that represents so clearly the fine line between life and death. The ER is at once chaotic and yet reassuring. It is a place to which few choose freely to come, yet a place that most depend on being there when their very greatest need arises. It is a place where the most fundamental of all human impulses reveals itself, and that is the will to live. This is perhaps most clearly understood by people who have experienced life-threatening circumstances such as those inherent to living with heart disease. These life threatening circumstances that arise in the everyday activities of health professionals practicing in the ER as well the everyday activities of people living with heart disease, contributes to a precarious and high stakes milieu within which their everyday existences must be negotiated.

This relatively small space of the hospital is a revered place where human lives are recurrently lost and saved, where tears of relief and grief flow in equal abundance. This is one of the many prevailing characteristics of this place that allow for the power of certain ways of thinking, knowing, and acting in reference to health issues to emerge and reign. In this space reside the discourses that dynamically and invisibly influence the communication between health care recipient and the health care provider, allowing experiences and self understandings to emerge in a certain way for both those seeking and giving care. It is in this space where in the context of potentially life threatening situations, identities are performed and constructed, and where certain aspects of social order are reified. Therefore, all the issues and aspects related to the Emergent Care will be discussed in detail.

Root Causes of the Main Issue

Of great significance too, is the context in which these performances unfold. It is indeed the emergency room where context becomes of paramount importance. The ER is to a large extent the gatekeeper to acute care in the Canadian health care system. The ER is frequently the first access point to health care, and almost always the first access point to critical life saving health care. People seeking acute health care must pass through this initial portal to the health care system in order to achieve the potentially lifesaving treatment that they seek. With its overflowing waiting room full of people waiting for care, with its never ending traffic of patients on their way to diagnostics and surgery and hospital admission, with its overall goal of rapid diagnosis, treatment, and patient flow, the ER is in effect a caricature of our health care system, and offers an exaggerated glimpse of how health care ...