Emergency Room Challenges: Bases For Enhancing Patient Care and Safety

Abstract

Objectives: This study evaluated the challenges encountered by healthcare personnel in the emergency departments of hospitals within the 5th District of Camarines Sur. Specifically, it investigated respondents' profiles, assessed challenges in emergency rooms across five domains, such as triage and assessment, staff training and competency, resource allocation and equipment availability, communication and coordination, and patient volume, and examined the relationship profile and challenges to inform strategies to enhance patient care and safety.
Methods: A descriptive-correlational research design was utilized. Employing a total enumeration sampling technique, data were gathered from 55 multidisciplinary emergency department personnel, predominantly nurses (74.55%), alongside resident physicians, midwives, nursing aides, and triage officers, across five participating hospitals using a structured survey questionnaire. To ensure institutional compliance, formal ethical approval was obtained from the relevant research ethics committee prior to data collection. Data analysis was performed using frequency counts, percentages, weighted means, and the Chi-square test of independence.
Results: The profile analysis revealed a workforce consisting mostly of female college graduates (80.01%) with short tenures, with 45.45% having only 1 to 5 years of service. While basic life support compliance was universal (100%), specialized advanced certifications were significantly lacking. The overall assessment showed that patient volume (WM=3.71) and resource allocation/equipment availability (WM= 3.42) were the top-ranked institutional challenges. Communication, staff training, and triage were moderately agreed upon as lesser challenges, frequently driven by frontline stress and ethical decision fatigue. Critically, Chi-square analysis proved that there is no significant relationship between any of the respondents' profile variables and the challenges faced.
Conclusions: The uniform non-significance across all profile variables indicates that emergency room bottlenecks are driven by systemic and institutional stressors rather than individual demographic or professional differences. Consequently, effective enhancement strategies must transcend individual training by prioritizing structural organizational reforms, including physical infrastructure expansion, dynamic resource planning, and systemic workload management.