EMTALA screening for nurses

[Hayduke]

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What are your thoughts on non-physician EMTALA Medical screening?

Do any of you perform "advanced triage" as a substitute?

In your opininion can a nurse differentiate between an emergency and a "safe" transfer/rejection to a degree that meets the requirements?

Thanks

H

 

[AxisNP]

I don't think EMTALA has hit us here as hard as other areas. Our state already had laws stating you couldn't transfer unless you just didn't have the facilities to treat.

For example: I worked on a Psychiatric unit. But we were a leve that did not take commitments or anyone considered violent. So we had to take all Psychiatric admissions unless the RN doing the assessment determined the person needed to be commited or would be dangerous to the unit. If a person was brought to the ER already under commitment they wouldn't even call the unit to send down a Psy RN to do the assessment.

As for non-Psychiatric it was similar. You could only transfer out if the hospital did not have the facilities to properly care for the patient.

So since we already had this in place EMTALA didn't affect us very often.

Our biggest problem has been HIPAA. It's interpretation seems to be different at different locations.

AxisNP