Bon Secours Offers 30-Minute Emergency Room Guarantee

[Lucky 13]

Bon Secours Hampton Roads, a division of Bon Secours Virginia, announced MOnday that it will be the only local health system in the region to offer a 30-minute guarantee in all of its emergency departments.

According to a news release, Bon Secours pledges that patients will be seen or have their treatment started within 30 minutes of arriving. If there is a failure to meet the guarantee, the emergency department will send the patient a written apology letter with a movie ticket or similar token of apology.

"I think if patients have to come to the emergency department, they want to be seen in a timely manner and they want to be able to come in and go out and ho home and be back with their family," said Michael Kerner, CEO of Bon Secours Hampton Roads.

Full story here.

To hell with a movie ticket. I say do it like Dominos used to...30 minutes or it's free.

[utfd701]

There are a couple of ER's around here that have that 30 minute deal as well.

[FranklinCountyVFF]

I'm with tommy. When my son had a eye injury I know we sat there for like two hours. I didn't know it at the time but the injury he had was a hyfema that is a serious injury to the eye. The triage nurse just sent us back out to the waiting room. If I would've known then I would've been a pretty pissed off camper.

[mongo619]

Borgess Hospital in Kalamazoo, MI has that guarentee. I think it is a great thing. A friend of mine from college got hit by an old lady while he was walking on campus one day, and called me to where he was to pick him up. He asked me to take him to the hospital to get checked out, and so we went to the closest one. We waited at that hospital for four hours just to get him into the beds. I called his parents while he was registering, and they made it from Detroit, all the way to Kalamazoo to Bronson Hospital in less time than it took for us to wait... Needless to say, his parents were a little upset.

[jester1965]

I like that 30 minutes to have your treatment started. Does this mean your vitals taken and back to the waiting room? A couple of years ago my wife had a reaction to some asthma medication that caused her heart rate to soar high enough that our primary care physician had her taken by ambulance to the ER because he feared she might have a cardiac event. We waited 4 hours after she was tranferred from the rig's stretcher to a gurney in the hallway of the ER before she was seen because they were "busy". Her heart rate was way lower by the time she was seen by the ER doc, who just told her to stop taking that med and released her. I was pretty pissed.
The smaller hospitals around here do usually get you started at least in less than 30 minutes as long as it ain't too serious, or massive trauma.