Emergency medicine needs patient focus.

Dr. Jeff O'Driscoll's "Changing the Face of Emergency Medicine" in the Jan/Feb, 2004 issue of The Physician Executive (Vol. 30, Issue 1) was a succinct, insightful article into some solutions to the current operational and service delivery challenges that emergency services face across the nation. "We must view the person as a patient and a customer" was a clear vision of where our specialty will require realignment with the requirements of persons who seek our care.

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Emergency medicine has developed as a specialty over the last three decades to include a formal body of knowledge and training programs devoted to the appropriate education required to instill that knowledge.

The next step in this specialty's journey will be to enhance the operational coordination of the environments in which emergency service delivery finds itself. The cry across the nation for more health care resources including emergency service resources can and must be critically analyzed. If poor operational process exists within an emergency department, more will only enlarge the scope of operational anarchy.

Hospital and department leaders and administrators would be well advised to study not just Dr. O'Driscoll's article, but many of the operational and systems initiatives that have been part of LDS hospital's vision for maximizing productivity and facilitating positive employee work environments in which teamwork allows for employees to work smarter, not harder, to give of their best to patient care.

In the end it, is our patients who are the most important beneficiaries of whether we in emergency services can effectively deliver care as a highly integrated team within a system of top-notch operational process.

Val Nicholson, MD, MHA, FACEP, FAAEM 

Cedar Falls, lowa