Patients per hour

[Jakcami22]

I was curious to see what expectations are across the board. I work in the midwest, and in my ER we are expected to see around 14 patients in a 10 hour shift. Sometimes that's easy and sometimes that's hard. If you work in fast track for the day, then you will likely be seeing 20 patients in that time. I am a new grad though, and this is only my second month of practice, but I feel that seeing 2 patients per hour can be extremely daunting and stressful. Would love input :)

[ohiovolffemtp]

How many patients you see per hour varies based on a large number of factors:

• your proficiency.  That will definitely improve over time.  Expect an approximate 3 year learning curve.
• the acuity of the patients you see: i.e. how sick they are.  However, this is much less important than their complexity. For example, a non-breathing opiate overdose is high acuity, but simple to fix.
• the complexity of the patients you see: number of comorbities, number of complaints.
• the number of procedures you do, and their complexity, e.g. repairing a large facial lac with good cosmetic results can be an hour +
• how "needy" the patients and who all's with them are:  how much time you spend in the room with them to get HPI, ROS, and answer all of their questions, persuade them to go along with plan, etc.
• how burdensome your EMR is
• how fast your ancillary services are: lab, imaging, and also nursing - how fast orders are done, etc.

14 patients in 10 hours in general sounds reasonable.

My personal yardstick is patients + procedures + 30  minute increments of critical care time of 2/hour.