Under a Federal law known as EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act), any patient who presents to the hospital for emergency care has the right to be evaluated and stabilized regardless of their financial status.

In order to establish which patients’ require treatment immediately, every hospital system throughout the United States utilizes a mechanism for sorting patients. Triage, the French word meaning to sort, is the system used to decide who should be treated first.

At San Jacinto Methodist Hospital, an experienced registered nurse obtains the history of each patient, takes their vital signs and performs any other functions deemed necessary to assess the patient. Depending on their status, a patient is either taken immediately into the emergency department or is sent to the waiting room to be treated later.

If the patient’s condition is not deemed emergent, the patient is classified either as a fast track patient or as one requiring non-emergent care needing to be evaluated by a physician. A fast track patient is one that has a minor problem, e.g. ear ache, simple sprain, etc. That patient will be seen in one of our five fast track rooms and is generally seen by a Nurse Practitioner or Physician’s Assistant, who reviews the patient’s case with a physician. Fast track patients move through the system quicker than the non-emergent patients because their illness does not require the use of other tests or treatments.

Non-emergent patients who don’t qualify for fast track require the use of more resources (laboratory tests, x-rays, respiratory treatments, etc.). Since these tests and treatments take time, these patients may be in the department longer.

A patient who is not emergent or fast track may also have a longer wait than the other two categories depending on how many emergent patients are in the emergency department and the acuteness of the emergent patients in the department. It is important to be aware that the sickest patients are always treated immediately, regardless of whether they arrive by private vehicle or ambulance. It is not uncommon for several emergent patients to come by ambulance while nonemergent patients are waiting in the waiting room.

We recognize that visiting the emergency department can be frustrating at times. In an effort to keep patients and their families informed of what is transpiring, we have recently placed a patient relations staff member in the emergency department seven days a week during our peak times. Their role is to keep patients and their families informed of the status of patient flow and to assist in any way they can. We are continually working to improve our service and to decrease the time that it takes to move through the emergency department.