Monday, 27 February 2017

Janet Quilloy and The Emergency Room

Janet B Quilloy has been a nurse for 24 years. During that time, she has been involved in many types of care, including emergency care. The emergency room is a hard place in which to work, especially in major cities, where often, there are not enough hospitals to deal with all of the emergencies that occur on a regular basis.

Emergency room staff have to deal with a wide number of injuries and illnesses, all while keeping as calm as possible and maintaining order. Triage is done when a large number of patients are in the emergency room at the same time. Patients are seen according to the severity of their case, and the physician and nurse performing triage can only hope that they are not putting the needs of a more serious patient behind those of a patient with a milder problem.

Emergency rooms have only been around for a little over one hundred years. The first trauma center in the world opened in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1911. A surgeon named Arnold Griswold was responsible for providing medical training for police officers and firefighters, and in the 1970s, firefighters finally became firefighter paramedics, providing emergency care to victims of fires and other accidents.

Hospitals are now designed to have an emergency room on the ground floor, where patients can easily be taken from an ambulance or other vehicle, or just walk in, if they are able to walk. In some lucky triage cases, the patient’s complaint is mild enough that it can be treated directly in the emergency room, with no need for surgery, X-rays, intubation, or other forms of emergency treatment.

Some emergency rooms have separate sections for patients who are children. Children can often have problems in describing what is wrong with them, which is often made worse by a frantic parent or parents demanding that the condition be treated immediately, even if the staff of the emergency room do not yet know what the problem is. Children experiencing minor issues, yet are afraid of this new environment and the new people in it, can be put at their ease by special therapists trained to deal with children’s issues.

Emergency rooms also have a psychiatric unit, for patients who are not sick or injured, but who are having a psychiatric problem, such as a psychotic outburst. Those who have threatened or attempted suicide are also taken here.

Janet Quilloy and Nursing

As Janet B Quilloy knows very well, nursing is a very hard, yet very rewarding, profession. Nurses literally have the power of life and death over their patients. A single mistake can mean the difference between life and death, between consciousness and coma, between an able-bodied patient and a patient who is paralyzed.

Janet Quilloy has been a nurse for 24 years, and she has seen a great many things and met a great many people through her work. She knows how hard the work is, and how rewarding, too. She has seen many a mother greet her newborn baby with tears of joy. She has seen many patients pass away – from old age, from disease, and from horrifying accidents.

The first nurse to be known as such was the famous Florence Nightingale, who defied her family and the society in which she was raised to nurse English soldiers during the Crimean War. Nightingale was already working in the field of health care, which was quite a surprise for a woman in the year 1853. The Crimean War broke out the following year, and Nightingale traveled to the area along with many nurses she had trained herself, including her own aunt. 15 nuns also traveled with them to bring comfort to the wounded and sick.

Nightingale found horrifyingly unsanitary conditions in Turkey, where the soldiers were hospitalized. Pleas to the British government resulted in a prefabricated hospital being manufactured in Britain and sent to Turkey, where it was quickly constructed. This, along with Nightingale’s then revolutionary insistence that all nurses wash their hands before and between tending to patients, was responsible for a sharp decline in the death rate.

Disease killed far more men than any other cause. These diseases, generally due to lack of proper ventilation and sewage, included typhus, cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. Nightingale’s work included ensuring that the sewers were cleaned and the ventilation improved, leading again to a much higher number of soldiers surviving.

Nightingale had made a name for herself that lasts to this day, and her popularity was such that she was given a large sum of money to create a training school for nurses. This school is still in existence, and it is now part of King’s College London. Janet Quilloy is very proud and pleased to be a nurse, one of those tireless workers typified by Florence Nightingale and others like her.